Just a word...Seventh Sunday of Easter...May 29, 2022
On this Memorial Day weekend it seems fitting to quote from the Declaration of Independence; “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all (men) are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” We are a nation of people who value their rights...one needs only to look at the news to confirm this. But what about our responsibilities, those obligations that are inextricably linked to said rights? The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ website reads, in the section under “Rights and Responsibilities of a Catholic,” that our tradition “teaches that human dignity can be protected and a healthy community can be achieved only if human rights are protected and responsibilities are met. Therefore, every person has a fundamental right to life and a right to those things required for human decency. Corresponding to these rights are duties and responsibilities to one another, to our families, to the larger society.” St. John XXIII echoed this theme in his encyclical “Pacem in Terris,” when he wrote, “to claim one’s rights and ignore one’s duties, or half fulfill them, is like building a house with one hand and tearing it down with the other.” And we all know what Jesus and Abraham Lincoln had to say about a house divided.
We seem to have devolved as a people into a society of ideologies, not of faith; a people of disparate opinions, no longer united by common values. We purport to believe that all life is sacred, but we lack the will to protect the living. Whether we use the words of the Constitution, declaring that we the people are to promote the general welfare, or the tradition of our church, to work for the common good, we fail to live up to what those terms mean.
It seems to me that if we continue to live with the status quo, and are resigned to accept that the violence in our country is just the way it is, it will remain just as it is...and that status quo is the one in which our rate of horrors as in Buffalo and most recently in Texas, is a mind-numbing 100 times the rate of such happenings in other countries. No thinking person, no Christian, no American, should accept the current situation as just the way it is.
Surely we are all heartsick over these all too frequent tragedies. Perhaps it is time to re-focus our energies to re-imagine our ways of being together, in our country and in our church. Maybe it is time to think less about defending our rights and turn toward examining our presuppositions and our consciences, to acknowledge our responsibilities toward and our obligations to one another. Let us move from being paralyzed into fear and the feeling that we cannot make a difference, into imagining our desired future and working toward that future, one in which all people, especially children, are safe from harm. As cited in the founding documents of both our faith and our country, life and its inherent dignity demand that we rouse ourselves from despair over our situation and live in the tension between what is and what can be, always working toward what can be.
We are a people of hope, hope that has been re-ignited by our experience of Resurrection during this Easter Season. This Memorial Day, let us claim that hope and nurture it, that it might propel us to work together for solutions, united in the recognition that we are responsible to and for one another. This is not a partisan issue, but it is a human rights and a pro-life stand, and it must be ours.
The children cannot wait.