Two Catholic priests imprisoned in Nicaragua since August arrived in Charlotte late Feb. 12 to hugs and tears from family and friends, after their release and deportation to the United States Feb. 9.
Frs. Ramiro Tijerino and Óscar Danilo Benavidez, both of Nicaragua, were among 222 political prisoners exiled from the country by President Daniel Ortega. Their release came after what the U.S. government said were concerted diplomatic efforts.
Mayra Tijerino, a parishioner at St. Matthew in Charlotte, flew to Washington to bring her brother and his fellow priest to her home in the Charlotte area.
The parish, which has been praying for him and his fellow political prisoners since their imprisonment last August, shared the good news of the priests’ return at Sunday Masses, and two dozen well-wishers turned out to greet them at Charlotte-Douglas International Airport.
« I am thankful to God, » Tijerino’s mother, near tears as she and her husband positioned themselves at the bottom of an escalator that would soon deliver their son.
« He’s coming! » a boy cried, spotting Tijerino, his uncle, descending toward him.
Well-wishers unfurled blue-and-white Nicaraguan flags as they greeted the priests, who appeared generally fit — and all smiles.
« There were some hard months but thanks to God and the prayers of this parish, we were given the strength to endure, » Tijerino said, working his way through a receiving line in baggage claim.
Benavidez was embraced as if he were family, too. « God bless the parish, » he said. « I am grateful to this diocese, and to the parish, and to the faithful whose prayers sustained us. »
Both priests said they were not physically mistreated in prison but noted emotional and psychological stress caused by such tactics as leaving the lights on for two straight months, then off for a month.
« They gave us food, » Tijerino said, « and the medical care wasn’t the best, but it was there. »
Fr. John Allen, parochial administrator of St. Matthew Parish, hugged his fellow priests and pledged to help with anything they needed. He has arranged for a physician to see both priests during the coming week and is planning a Mass of Thanksgiving at an appropriate time.
« Today is a joyous day for their family and friends, and we look forward to celebrating with them at St. Matthew, » Allen said. « As witness to the power of prayer, we will continue to pray for Bishop Álvarez who remains imprisoned and in danger. »
Bishop Rolando Álvarez of Matagalpa — a vocal critic of the Nicaraguan government who was forcefully put under house arrest in August — refused to board the Feb. 9 flight carrying the group of political prisoners to the United States, according to Ortega, who says the prelate wanted to meet first with his fellow bishops. The bishop was subsequently moved from house arrest, where he had languished incommunicado for five months, to a prison notorious for deplorable conditions.
On Feb. 10, Álvarez was convicted and sentenced by a Nicaraguan court to 26 years in prison. The court convicted the bishop on charges of conspiracy to undermine national integrity and spreading false information after a secret trial in which he was denied a lawyer of his choosing. He was also stripped of his Nicaraguan citizenship and prohibited from holding elected office or a public position.
Álvarez was not present as Judge Octavio Rothschuh delivered the decision over state-controlled media.
In his Sunday morning message Feb. 12, Pope Francis invited the faithful to pray and expressed sadness over the continued detention of Álvarez. He issued an appeal for Nicaraguan leaders « to open their hearts » in search of peace and to engage in dialogue.
As an independent institution trusted by a large portion of Nicaraguans, the church is a threat to Ortega’s increasingly authoritarian rule. Student protests intensified last spring and numerous Catholic and other religious leaders were among those detained during a crackdown last summer.
« I am grateful to God for bringing me here, and I am happy to see my family, » Tijerino said Feb. 12, kissing his infant nephew Eduardo, whom he was meeting for the first time.
« I knew I would see them again — I just didn’t know when, » he told the Catholic News Herald, Charlotte’s diocesan newspaper. « I want to thank the Catholic community of Charlotte for their prayers of support for me, and I hope we will remember and continue to bring strength to the prisoners who remain in Nicaragua. »
The Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego said Feb. 10 it may declare bankruptcy in the coming months as it faces « staggering » legal costs in dealing with some 400 lawsuits alleging priests and others sexually abused children.
In a letter that was expected to be shared with parishioners over the weekend, Cardinal Robert McElroy said the cases were filed after California lifted a statute of limitations on childhood sexual abuse claims.
Assembly Bill 218, which was signed into law in 2019, allows alleged victims to sue up until age 40. Also, beginning in 2020, it opened a three-year window for filing lawsuits without age limitations.
Most of the alleged abuse cited in the suits took place 50 to 75 years ago, and the earliest claim dates to 1945, Kevin Eckery, communications director for the diocese, said at a Feb. 10 news conference, KNSD-TV reported.
Eckery predicted that it would cost the diocese $550 million to settle the cases, none of which have gone to trial.
In his letter, the cardinal said none of the suits involve allegations against any currently serving priest.
« This reflects the reality that the Church has taken enormous steps to root out the sexual abuse of minors in its life and to promote the protection of minors, » McElroy wrote.
Even so, the diocese is facing « staggering » legal costs and most of its assets were used to settle previous allegations with a $198 million payout in 2007, McElroy wrote.
« Even with insurance, the diocese will not be able to pay out similar sums now, » the letter said. « This challenge is compounded by the fact that a bill has now been introduced into the Legislature that seeks to eliminate the statute of limitations entirely, leaving the diocese vulnerable to potential lawsuits forever. »
Bankruptcy would « provide a pathway » for the diocese to compensate sexual abuse victims while continuing to run its ministries, the cardinal said.
The diocese has more than 100 active priests and covers San Diego and Imperial counties, an area of more than 8,800 square miles (about 22,800 square kilometers) with a Catholic population of nearly 1.4 million, according to its website.
(Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time-Year A; This homily was given on February 12, 2023 at Santo Spirito in Sassia in Rome, Italy; See Sirach 15:15-20 and Matthew 5:17-37)
« It’s up to you. » When you hear that, do you believe it’s true? Advertisers hawk phrases like this to imply that the « right choice » is available for a price you can’t afford to pass up. When my mother would say « It’s up to you, » the consequences for making the wrong choice were predictably unpleasant.
How much freedom do we really have? That’s the question of today’s readings.
Almost 200 years before Christ, Yeshua, the author of Book of Sirach, responded to this question in a collection of the best wisdom and religious advice he could gather. In today’s first reading, Yeshua asserts that human beings are free to choose life or loss. He wanted to liberate people from the idea that their lives were predetermined or controlled by fate.
Belief in fate or freedom generates a self-fulfilling prophecy. Unless your name is Sisyphus, most people who feel controlled by the fates will not struggle against them.
Meanwhile, people who believe they have free will usually opt to choose how to deal with all that happens, no matter their degree of control over their circumstances.
While today’s psalm promotes the idea that adherence to God’s law is the way of wisdom, Paul’s letter to the Corinthians offers an interesting twist on this idea. Paul calls the Corinthians’ attention to a different sort of wisdom. According to Paul, mature Christians have learned the mysterious wisdom of the cross: an apparent failure that ushers in blessing beyond measure.
Paul is operating in the paradoxical realm of Gospel living. For him, real wisdom leads people to admit and accept the fact that they understand only the slightest sliver of the truth. In Paul’s way of thinking, the people who are animated by the Spirit are wise enough to trust that neither their eyes nor ears, nor even heart can comprehend what has been begun in them and will be completed by God.
Under Paul’s guidance, we might read today’s Gospel not as a sermon, but as a revelation of Jesus’ own consciousness and wisdom.
The interpretive key to everything Jesus wanted to say is encapsulated in the phrase, « I have not come to abolish, but to fulfill. » Jesus, the prophetic Jewish preacher, understood that his vocation was to demonstrate the deep meaning of everything that had gone before him, particularly of God’s loving interaction with humanity.
In an oppressed society hoping for military victories, Jesus preached radical nonviolence.
In a religious tradition that cherished sacrifice as humans’ best offering to God, Jesus taught that interpersonal reconciliation was worth more than any material offering.
In a patriarchal and slave-holding society, Jesus preached that looking on another as an object for self-gratification rather than as an equal subject before God was tantamount to adultery. (Remember, adultery was the most common description of Israel’s religious unfaithfulness and it was more a question of the unfaithfulness of idolatry than anything sexual.)
In a society that valued physical integrity and saw disability as a sign of God’s disfavor, Jesus claimed that being maimed or blind was preferable to denigrating another in thought or action. (Some early Christian fundamentalists took his hyperbole to heart and maimed themselves — completely missing Jesus’ sense of humor and hyperbole.)
Any one of Jesus’ phrases summarizes his whole teaching, yet the simplest and clearest is « Let your ‘Yes’ mean ‘Yes’ and your ‘No’ mean ‘No.’ » Who could ask for a more straightforward call to the never-ending task of living with integrity? When we describe Jesus with words like holy, wondrous, loving and faithful, each of those describes a dimension of his integrity as son of God and son of man, as the person who fulfilled the human vocation to be an image of God.
As he preached the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus revealed his own discernment about the purpose of life and the place of law. Jesus had realized that anger, resentment, the use of others for personal pleasure or gain, and the easy severing of relationships were nothing more than diverse expressions of profound disrespect for the other.
Jesus preached, not to burden others, but to invite them into profound freedom. Today, he would surely remind us that relishing anger or grudges — even at injustice — confines us in self-made mental/emotional prisons and implicitly reveals that we consider our opinion of others as infallible. Jesus’ warning against lust applies also to racism, sexism, and all the bigotries that assume that our way is the norm while others are deviants.
Today’s Scriptures invite us to lay claim to the freedom to live in love. We cannot control others, but we can choose how to respond to them. In baptism and every celebration of the Eucharist we say yes to Christ’s way. Let our yes be yes!
In the contemporary world, religious poetry is often dismissed as didactic or pietistic. But religious poetry in its themes and art is deeply allied to spirituality: Poetry’s focus on meaning, suffering, life, death, love and nature allies it with the themes of religion. Poetry requires one to slow down, pay attention, encounter the real meaning of things; in that sense it is like religious ritual. A universal and the purview of ancient priests, poetry, like song, evokes emotion. It is a form of enchantment that can transform. Poetry does not provide answers, but it stimulates questions that awaken. Poetry may be the contemporary remedy for what ails us.
There are few contemporary poets who can effectively do for us what religion does — that is, bring solace, give courage, connect us to all that is, overcome loneliness and a sense of meaninglessness. Poetry evokes a stage prior to religion. As Anglican writer Evelyn Underhill said: Poetry is the royal banner that goes before prayer.
One little-known poet had this gift. Possessing an incarnational imagination, she knew both suffering and love, the two wellsprings that bring one to awe and mystery, and prompt reaching out in compassion.
Anne Channing Porter was born in 1911 to a non-Christian family of means and reputation. Her two loves were poetry and nature. She dropped out of college and considered herself a misfit; when she married painter Fairfield Porter, they were connected to the bohemian world of the New York poets and painters in the 1950s and 1960s. Although she wrote poetry her whole life, she published only a few poems. She was a mother of five, including a son with a disability. She was hostess to the many who visited and ate at their table. Guests of the Porters might stay for weeks, but sometimes years.
The Porters’ marriage was a stormy one; through it all, Anne wrote poetry in private, never seeking publication. In 1954, at age 43, Anne converted to Catholicism, influenced by the likes of Franciscan priests, Dorothy Day, Julian of Norwich, Francis of Assisi, Abbe Huvelin and later Teilhard de Chardin. The Porters’ friends were atheists, Marxists and Freudians who could not understand her conversion. They must have only grown more perplexed when, a few years later, she became a Third Order Franciscan.
When Fairfield unexpectedly died in 1975, Anne Porter was 65, and only after that did she begin to publish her poems. She continued to do so until her death in 2011 at almost 100 years old.
Porter was a late-blooming poet. At age 83 she published An Altogether Different Language, a 1994 National Book Award finalist, and in 2006 her poems were published in In Another Word. Living Things: Collected Poems of Anne Porter was published in 2006.
The starting point to Porter’s writing was her belief that the kingdom of God is within and without, in every person and in all creation. She wrote of the personal and global suffering of the innocents and the elderly. She pled to Mary, the « flowering / of our human beauty, » for in her heart « the lost / Rejected and abandoned ones / Are held in honor. » One of her most powerful poems, « A Song of Fear and Fire, » is about the afterlife, when she would become a « tiny flake of ash » and will be « tossed / Into a fearful nothingness s/ Beyond the stars / whirling / Until my fire goes out / … I still will praise you. »
One of Porter’s most luminous poems is « Music, » in which she recalls weeping as a child while her mother played the piano. Music at its most beautiful opens a wound in us, an ache of desolation, of homesickness, she wrote, « But we were made for Paradise »:
And when music comes to us
With its heavenly beauty
It brings us desolation
We half remember
That lost native country …
And shining at the heart of it
Is the longed-for beauty
Of the One who waits for us
Who will always wait for us
In those radiant meadowsYet also came to live with us
And wanders where we wander.
If she knew the beauty of music and nature, she also knew suffering. Her son, Johnny, had an undiagnosed disease and died young. He was a punster, a misfit, who whooped and growled with wild ecstatic joy. He was not afraid of dying, just of getting hurt: « So Johnny, now you’re one of the greatest, / Because here on earth you were certainly one of the least. »
Porter was attuned to suffering in her own family and globally as well. She was alive to her sins of commission and omission. In « A Short Testament » she writes:
Whatever harm I may have done
In all my life in all your wide creation
If I cannot repair it
I beg you to repair it …And where there are lives I may have withered around me,
Or lives of strangers far or near
That I’ve destroyed in blind complicity,
And if I cannot find them
Or have no way to serve them,Remember them. I beg you to remember them.
Anne Porter’s poetry is testimony to her rich interior life. She learned from nature to pay attention and to be receptive. In nature she heard the « altogether different language » of praise. Her humility and suffering were the source of her compassion; this luminous poetry was what poured out.
