On the evening of May 18th, five priests driving north from Guatemala City for a community meeting were stopped by masked gunmen. After robbing the priests of their belongings, they opened fire, killing Fr. Lawrence (Lorenzo) Rosebaugh, an American priest, and seriously wounding Fr. Jean Claude Nowama, a Congolese priest.

This item on the news hit close to home, not just because the victims were priests, but because they were all members of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the community to which I belong, and the man who was killed was someone whom I knew well and deeply admired.

Mircea Eliade warned communities to not botch its deaths. Our community does not want to botch this one. Lorenzo Rosebaugh was no ordinary man and no ordinary priest. He was a special gift to the world, to the church, to our community, and especially to the poor for whom he gave his life.

Fr. Lorenzo was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, in 1935, but grew up in St. Louis. He entered the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate in 1955 and was ordained to the priesthood in 1963. Always in love with the poor and driven by a passion for justice, Lorenzo was strongly influenced by Dorothy Day and Daniel Berrigan. For this, he paid a price.

In 1968, in protest of the Vietnam war, he burned some draft files. This landed him in prison for two years. In 1975, he hitchhiked to Brazil and for the next several years lived on the streets of Recife, without a rectory or an address, celebrating the Eucharist with the street people and helping them find food each day. This aroused the suspicion of the authorities and he was arrested, imprisoned, and beaten. Given the political climate in Brazil at the time he would, no doubt, have disappeared had there not been international pressure for his release. Indeed it was only after Rosalyn Carter visited there that he was released. She met with him afterwards and he made the most of the opportunity, asking her to intervene on behalf of prison conditions in Brazil.

In the 1980s, a near-deadly bout of hepatitis forced him to return to the United States for treatment, but he was soon active again. In 1983 he was arrested for sabotaging a public address system at Fort Benning and playing Archbishop Romero's last homily through it. For this action, he spent another 18 months in prison.

From there, he moved to the Catholic Worker in New York, then on to El Salvador to live again with the poor, and, after a long retreat at our Oblate Motherhouse in France and some time in St. Louis to tend to his dying mother and write a memoir, he moved to Guatemala where he ministered to the poor until his death last month.

He authored a book about his experiences: "To Wisdom through Failure: A Journey of Compassion, Resistance and Hope". I had the privilege of writing the Foreword for this book, a disarmingly honest account of his inner journey through all of this. Among other things, I said this:

Daniel Berrigan once said: A prophet does not make a vow of alienation, but a vow of love. This is what Lorenzo did. He made a vow of love and it has taken him over some pretty rough roads, mostly alone, mostly on foot, landed him in prison, left his body beaten and showing the wear and tear of it, but it has left him in the end - happy, mellow, gentle, faithful, honest, and wonderfully grateful. Our religious community was founded to serve the poor and our founder challenged us to learn the language of the poor. We all try to do that, but only a few have the charism and heart to actually get down and dirty, right on the streets where the poorest of the poor look for food, for a bed, for consolation, for dignity, and for God. Lorenzo learned the language of the poor, became their friend, their advocate, and their priest and we are proud of him!

At his funeral, his provincial superior described him as "partly John the Baptist, partly Francis of Assisi". That's exactly how the poor saw him.

Lorenzo didn't like to talk about himself, but at our Motherhouse in France one night he shared this story: "Before I first went to prison for civil disobedience, I did a retreat with Daniel Berrigan. He told us: 'If you can't do this without growing angry and bitter - then don't do it!' I prayed the whole night before my first arrest, both because I was scared and because I knew I needed God's help not to grow angry and bitter!"

And he never did grow angry or bitter. Always gentle in spirit and baptized by the poor, I suspect that even in his final moments when an unthinking gunman was senselessly ending his life, he, like Jesus, had an empathic sense of why this was happening: "Forgive them; they know not what they do!"

Ron Rolheiser, OMI

This week we find Jesus powerless to work miracles.

He came to his home-town Nazareth, the Gospel says, and “he was not able to perform any mighty deed there, apart from curing a few sick people by laying his hands on them.”

Why not?

It is an intriguing question, because most of us think of miracles as based on power, as acts done by a mighty person. Jesus, God in human form, must have been all-powerful, just as God is. What was stopping him?

Let us take a different look at miracles. Instead Jesus being a solo act, an individual who does a whole lot of terrific things, try seeing him as the enfleshment of God. This will shift the question and make us look at what God is.

There are many answers, of course, but the one that is most agreed upon is very simple. God is love. God has loved human beings since he first created them.

Alright, you say, if he loves the blind and the lame and the homeless, why couldn’t he use that Godly love in Nazareth? What took away his powers?

Now we are getting to the heart of the question. Think of a love relation. Doesn’t love have to be two-way? I know that we must often go without the return of love from people we care for, but that is not the ideal. For a relationship to be real, I must be loved and I must love in return. Mutuality is love’s hallmark.

So we must say that God reality consists of mutual love. There will be time later to speak of the love dynamic that exists within the Trinity. Right now it is enough to see that all through the Old and New Testament God was thirsting for a shared union with human beings. “I will be your God, and you will be my people and love me in return.” Please!

Now we can see what took away Jesus’ miracles. The people in his home-town would not accept him. These people already had him in a category—carpenter. son of that working couple Joseph and Mary, the guy who used to live down the street. Who does he think he is preaching all this new stuff? So instead of listening to what he said, they made the noise with their tongues that we spell “tut,” which in the Midwest United States means, “look who is trying to put on airs. We know who he really is.”

They were pre-sealed against him.

But Jesus was not a circus performer or a magician. He did not work miracles in order to be noticed or to show off. In fact he took great pains to avoid being noticed.

This is why he said so often to the people he healed, “your faith has saved you.” Jesus’ miracles were an outcropping of the living, loving bonding we are invited to have with him. Faith is our acceptance of that bonding and without it God’s loving power cannot reach us.

Think it over. Do you and I ever listen to the offer of love from Christ and then harden our hearts to it? We can be quite crusty, you an I, and maybe we need to soften up a bit.

Fr. John Foley, S. J.

God did not make death, the book of Wisdom declares. Our God is a God of life, whose will for us is expressed in such words as being, wholesome, undying, imperishable. This God calls us to walk in the light of Christ, which is life, and not in the darkness of hatred and sin, which is death.

We must, therefore, be on the side of life, opposed to death. This should include opposition to all those things that diminish life.

The Gospel is about two healing incidents in the life of Jesus, healings which show that Jesus willed life, and willed full life. The Greek word for being healed also means being saved: to be brought to full life is the essence of salvation.

The second reading mentions another form of the diminution of life: poverty. No one should live on the survival level: there should be a certain equality.

We live in a society that pays lip-service to respect for life, and does not even do that much for quality of life. Jesus Christ challenges us to create a society that values life and rescues people from all forms of death and dying.

“Every man has the right to life, to bodily integrity, and to the means which are necessary and suitable for the proper development of life. These means are primarily food, clothing, shelter, rest, medical care, and finally the necessary social services. Therefore, a human being also has the right to security in cases of sickness, inability to work, widowhood, old age, unemployment, or in any other case in which he is deprived of the means of subsistence through no fault of his own.”

Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris (1963) 11

Gerald Darring

We humans are full of pride. We depend on our own resources and think we can solve any problem by applying our wit and energy.

Meanwhile, the problems pile up. Wars proliferate. Hunger abounds. The ecology deteriorates. There is poverty, homelessness, unemployment. Frustration drives some to crime. Others seek relief in drugs.

Perhaps one day we will realize that it will take more than our feeble efforts to rid the world of these problems. It will take the power of God, the one who shut within doors the sea and made the clouds its garment.

Humans alone against the great injustices of the world are like the disciples in the boat during the storm. They are helpless, unable to control these primal forces.

If only they would realize that they have with them the Lord of the universe, the one who can make the wind and the sea obey!

If only they would not be so lacking in faith, then maybe, by joining their efforts with the power of the almighty God, they could say to all the warmongers and haters and oppressors of the world: Quiet! Be still!

“Any interpretation that restricts the human predicament to a single, well-circumscribed problem, soluble through structural changes alone, is bound to be dangerously one-sided. Even to expect the solution of all human suffering or all social justice from revolution or social reform is to prepare oneself for bitter disillusionment.”

U.S. Bishops, Pastoral Letter on Marxist Communism (1980) 32

Gerald Darring