“Small signs of God’s presence in our neighborhoods”

Pope Francis in Holguín’s Plaza de la Revolucion

an official Vatican transcript of his homily during his Cuba visit

We are celebrating the feast of the apostle and evangelist Saint Matthew. We are celebrating the story of a conversion. Matthew himself, in his Gospel, tell us what it was like, this encounter which changed his life. He shows us an “exchange of glances” capable of changing history.

On a day like any other, as Matthew, the tax collector, was seated at his table, Jesus passed by, saw him, came up to him and said: “Follow me.” Matthew got up and followed him.

Jesus looked at him. How strong was the love in that look of Jesus, which moved Matthew to do what he did! What power must have been in his eyes to make Matthew get up from his table! We know that Matthew was a publican: he collected taxes from the Jews to give to the Romans. Publicans were looked down upon and considered sinners; as such, they lived apart and were despised by others. One could hardly eat, speak or pray with the likes of these. For the people, they were traitors: they extorted from their own to give to others. Publicans belonged to this social class.

Jesus, on the other hand, stopped; he did not quickly take his distance. He looked at Matthew calmly, peacefully. He looked at him with eyes of mercy; he looked at him as no one had ever looked at him before. And this look unlocked Matthew’s heart; it set him free, it healed him, it gave him hope, a new life, as it did to Zacchaeus, to Bartimaeus, to Mary Magdalene, to Peter, and to each of us. Even if we do not dare raise our eyes to the Lord, he looks at us first. This is our story, and it is like that of so many others. Each of us can say: “I, too, am a sinner, whom Jesus has looked upon.” I ask you, in your homes or in the Church, to be still for a moment and to recall with gratitude and happiness those situations, that moment, when the merciful gaze of God was felt in our lives.

Jesus’s love goes before us, his look anticipates our needs. He can see beyond appearances, beyond sin, beyond failures and unworthiness. He sees beyond our rank in society. He sees beyond this, to our dignity as sons and daughters, a dignity at times sullied by sin, but one which endures in the depth of our soul. He came precisely to seek out all those who feel unworthy of God, unworthy of others. Let us allow Jesus to look at us. Let us allow his gaze to run over our streets. Let us allow that look to become our joy, our hope.

After the Lord looked upon him with mercy, he said to Matthew: “Follow me.” Matthew got up and followed him. After the look, a word. After love, the mission. Matthew is no longer the same; he is changed inside. The encounter with Jesus and his loving mercy has transformed him. He leaves behind his table, his money, his exclusion. Before, he had sat waiting to collect his taxes, to take from others; now, with Jesus he must get up and give, give himself to others. Jesus looks at him and Matthew encounters the joy of service. For Matthew and for all who have felt the gaze of Jesus, other people are no longer to be “lived off,” used and abused. The gaze of Jesus gives rise to missionary activity, service, self-giving. Jesus’s love heals our short-sightedness and pushes us to look beyond, not to be satisfied with appearances or with what is politically correct.

Jesus goes before us, he precedes us; he opens the way and invites us to follow him. He invites us slowly to overcome our preconceptions and our reluctance to think that others, much less ourselves, can change. He challenges us daily with the question: “Do you believe? Do you believe it is possible that a tax collector can become a servant? Do you believe it is possible that a traitor can become a friend? Do you believe is possible that the son of a carpenter can be the Son of God?” His gaze transforms our way of seeing things, his heart transforms our hearts. God is a Father who seeks the salvation of each of his sons and daughters.

Let us gaze upon the Lord in prayer, in the Eucharist, in Confession, in our brothers and sisters, especially those who feel excluded or abandoned. May we learn to see them as Jesus sees us. Let us share his tenderness and mercy with the sick, prisoners, the elderly and families in difficulty. Again and again we are called to learn from Jesus, who always sees what is most authentic in every person, which is the image of his Father.

I know the efforts and the sacrifices being made by the Church in Cuba to bring Christ’s word and presence to all, even in the most remote areas. Here I would mention especially the “mission houses” which, given the shortage of churches and priests, provide for many people a place for prayer, for listening to the word of God, for catechesis and community life. They are small signs of God’s presence in our neighborhoods and a daily aid in our effort to respond to the plea of the apostle Paul: “I beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all lowliness and meekness, forbearing one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (cf. Eph 4:1-3).

I now turn my eyes to the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre, whom Cuba embraced and to whom it opened its doors forever. I ask Our Lady to look with maternal love on all her children in this noble country. May her “eyes of mercy” ever keep watch over each of you, your homes, your families, and all those who feel that they have no place. In her love, may she protect us all as she once cared for Jesus.

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Accountability for a flagrantly illegal campaign: slow and in a major case absent

How can we say that the campaign that Ricardo Martinelli and his followers waged in 2014 was “flagrantly illegal?” Isn’t there much to be determined? Isn’t there a presumption of innocence?

Yes, we have heard all that, incessantly, from the former president’s phalanxes of lawyers, even if mostly what they argue is that as a specially privileged person Martinelli himself is not accountable before the law.

Now his erstwhile president of the National Assembly is also facing charges before the Supreme Court, this time over clearly overpriced no-bid government purchases of rice, beans and lentils, allegedly with kickbacks that went toward funding the Martinelista shower of gifts on the voters.

Just an allegation? Can’t prove any intent? Can’t get a witness to a specific agreement that “you get this bag of groceries and in return we get your vote?” Can’t show what Gálvez knew and when he knew it? It’s up to a magistrate appointed as prosecutor to prove the details, but much of this work has been done before other tribunals.

In a by-election for representante in the Tonosi corregimiento of El Bebedero, there was a massive distribution of gifts to voters to buy the election for Martinelli’s candidate. The money for that vote-buying campaign came from a man who got overpriced no-bid highway construction contracts. The Electoral Tribunal held a trial about the matter, determined that in reality it amounted to the use of government funds to sway the electorate and ordered new elections.

At the time Gálvez said that El Bebedero was the model of how the 2014 election would be contested, and infamously declared that “He who doesn’t give doesn’t go.” Then the entire nation saw that kind of campaign waved in all of our faces. The nature of what happened was demonstrated in more than a dozen more Electoral Tribunal trials. There are many adjectives properly applied to Sergio Gálvez, but “subtle” is not one of them.

In any case, the charges now before the Supreme Court are about one small part of the enormous crime, the legislators’s alleged role in some corrupt purchases. The court should really investigate the context and bring further charges for the larger crime.

The infamous 2014 Martinelista campaign went on in large part because Martinelli’s appointee as Electoral Prosecutor, Eduardo Peñaloza, refused to enforce the election laws. He taunted the nation about it. Now a criminal complaint against him for malfeasance in office has been discounted by Attorney General Kenia Porcell. Was the complaint, for some reason or another, technically deficient? Perhaps, but it did have the backing of the nation’s principal bar association, the Colegio Nacional de Abogados. Let us hope that Porcell’s ruling is not the end of the matter.

Peñaloza’s role as a key operative in the illegal 2014 Martinelista campaign should not go uninvestigated and unpunished. We can’t have a truly fair election with him in charge of enforcing election laws. We won’t have much respect for our election laws until Panamanians see Peñaloza taken away to jail in handcuffs.

War loses — sort of

The extension of the filibuster power to the point that now a large enough minority in the US Senate can block any measure from even coming before the body in a formal debate is unfortunate, and all the more so because greed and extreme partisanship have a stranglehold on Congress in particular and US politics in general. But the bad system worked well enough when enough senators banded together to block an Israeli government attempt to nullify an agreement that Barack Obama and the leaders of several other major powers made with the government of Iran with respect to nuclear development that could lead to an Iranian nuclear arsenal.

Do we hear howls about what an anti-Semitic thing it is to allege such a thing about the government of Israel? The Panama News is on a bunch of Israeli email lists, and the editor reads what they write. He also from time to time peruses Ha’aretz and The Jerusalem Post online. Then there was the online exchange in which an Israeli citizen — and not a US-Israeli dual citizen — chortled that “We control Congress.” Mr. Netanyahu, who wants a war with Iran that would certainly follow on the heels of the Iranian nuclear proliferation agreement’s failure, was told by his own military and intelligence establishment that Israel could not succeed in an attack on Iran, so he tried to browbeat the Americans into partaking of that disaster instead. But a large segment of American Jews, including many of the Jews in Congress, spurned the Israeli government’s appeals. We shall see what the political fallout will bring, both in Washington and Tel Aviv.

So a roadblock was interposed along the way to a US war with Iran. It was a victory for peace, to be sure, but do we have peace?

Millions of refugees streaming out of war-torn Syria answer that question. So do the thousands of people killed in the Yemeni civil war, in which the Saudis and other Gulf Arab states are directly intervening with US support. So does the unresolved 14-year war in Afghanistan.

Calls from the Republican base to remove the millions of American Muslims, “constitutional theories” that would cancel the citizenship of US-born children of immigrants (except for Donald Trump), and hideous misrepresentions of people fleeing wars as invaders bent on conquest — aren’t these, after all, arguments in favor of provoking new wars? Moreover, when an Australian billionaire who — along with his Saudi partners — likes to play kingmaker in US politics through his media empire slams proposals to rebuild America’s infrastructure, educational system and standard of living as prohibitively expensive, isn’t the unstated number beneath his dubious calculations the cost of the United States fighting never-ending wars all over the planet?

War has lost a round in the US Senate. That’s no reason for antiwar voters to stay home and shut up.

Bear in mind…

A letter to Pope Francis

by Sister Joan Chittister

Dear Pope Francis,

Your visit to the United States is important to us all. We have watched you make the papacy a model of pastoral listening. You have become for us a powerful reminder of the Jesus who walked among the crowds listening to them, loving them — healing them.

Your commitment to poverty and mercy, to the lives of the poor and the spiritual suffering of many — however secure they may feel materially — gives us new hope in the integrity and holiness of the Church itself. A church that is more about sin than the suffering of those who bear the burdens of the world is a puny church, indeed. In the face of the Jesus who consorted with the most wounded, the most outcast of society, all the time judging only the judgers, your insistence is the lesson of a lifetime for the self-righteous and the professionally religious.

It is with this awareness that we raise two issues here:

The first is the dire poverty to which you draw our attention ceaselessly. You refuse to allow us to forget the inhumanity of the barrios everywhere, the homeless on bank steps in our own society, the overworked, the underpaid, the enslaved, the migrant, the vulnerable and those invisible to the mighty of this era.

You make the world see what we have forgotten. You call us to do more, to do something, to provide the jobs, the food, the homes, the education, the voice, the visibility that bring dignity, decency and full development.

But there is a second issue lurking under the first that you yourself may need to give new and serious attention to as well. The truth is that women are the poorest of the poor. Men have paid jobs; few women in the world do. Men have clear civil, legal and religious rights in marriage; few women in the world do. Men take education for granted; few women in the world can expect the same. Men are allowed positions of power and authority outside the home; few women in the world can hope for the same. Men have the right to ownership and property; most of the women of the world are denied these things by law, by custom, by religious tradition. Women are owned, beaten, raped and enslaved regularly simply because they are female. And worst of all, perhaps, they are ignored — rejected — as full human beings, as genuine disciples, by their churches, including our own.

It is impossible, Holy Father, to be serious about doing anything for the poor and at the same time do little or nothing for women.

I implore you to do for the women of the world and the church what Jesus did for Mary who bore him, for the women of Jerusalem who made his ministry possible, for Mary of Bethany and Martha to whom he taught theology, for the Samaritan Woman who was the first to recognize Jesus as the Messiah, for Mary of Magdala who is called the Apostle to the Apostles, and for the deaconesses and leaders of the house churches of the early church.

Until then, Holy Father, nothing can really change for their hungry children and their inhuman living conditions.

We’re glad you are here to speak to these things. We trust you to change them, starting with the Church itself.

Sister Joan Chittister, OSB

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