"Simply Amazed - Forever Grateful" is carved at the top of my already-installed tombstone. I composed it a few years ago to sum up my life so far. Those are the words that came to mind as I began to realize the implications of what was happening as I watched the TV as they announced the name of our new Pope. The election of Pope Leo XIV will forever add an important event in my growing list of life experiences that drove me to come up with those words as a summary of how I felt about my life. Yes, I am simply amazed and forever grateful for Pope Leo's election!
Why am I amazed and grateful? Even though It makes me proud, it is not because he is American born. It is because his election has seriously validated my own ministry in the last fifty-five years and given me hope and enthusiasm again that I thought was beginning to wane within me.
What do I mean "his election has seriously validated my ministry?" I have often described myself as "Consciously Christian, Deliberately Catholic and Unapologetically Ecumenical and Inter-Faith." I even did many Parish Missions by that name. I think today that is some of what Pope Leo XIV is going to be about as he takes Pope Francis' vision to the next level. Once again, we as a church have been given a dynamic inspirational moral leader and this country has been given a dynamic alternative to the immoral, corrupt and mean-spirited fumes that have been breathing in lately. Pope Leo is "An American like no other American," as the Italians are saying. We now have two highly visible American world leaders, side-by-side, presenting opposing options for us to choose from when it comes to us building our futures.
What do I mean "his election has seriously validated my ministry?" Secondly, I have been reaching out to, and writing about, marginal, left-out, excluded, rejected and hurting Catholics and various members of other faiths from the the very beginning of my ministry as a priest. I have listed some of them further on in this post, but the fact is I was doing that ministry most visibly at the Cathedral of the Assumption starting 30 years before Pope Francis was elected. As Pope Leo said on the balcony in his first speech, "God loves all people - unconditionally." I was saying this to the growing congregation of our Cathedral for years, "God loves everybody - no ands, ifs or buts about it!" Because of that message, we earned the nickname "The Island of Misfit Toys" because people were reminded of the children's film, "Rudolf, the Red-Nosed Reindeer" where broken toys could go to be repaired so that they too could be part of Christmas!
What do I mean "his election has seriously validated my ministry?" Here is a short list of some of my involvement in ministry to the marginal, left-out, excluded, rejected and hurting Catholics, as well as various members of other faiths - all those who God loves unconditionally and all those we are called to love unconditionally as well!
(1) When I was in major seminarian, I chose a Disciple of Christ history professor on the seminary faculty to be my advisor/spiritual director, while choosing a priest-monk as a confessor.
(2) I was first given an opportunity to learn to preach by the United Church of Christ in 1968 when I became one of the first two Catholic seminarians to join their Christian Ministry in the National Parks program and was assigned to preach in Crater Lake National Park in Oregon.
(3) After ordination, I accepted an assignment in the "home missions" of our diocese. I started an interfaith campus ministry program at Somerset Community College called IF - for INTER-FAITH. I volunteered to do interfaith services at Lake Cumberland Boys Camp for juvenal delinquents and took students of various religious backgrounds, most of whom had never been out of Kentucky, to France on five backpacking trips to the ecumenical monastery in Taize. I opened a used clothing and household items store for the poor called "Clothes 'n Stuff." I preached in several Protestant churches, a baccalaureate service at an all non-Catholic high school three years in a row and had an interfaith radio program on Sundays called "Morning Has Broken" for a few years.
(5) After ordination, I earned my doctorate in 1980 from McCormick (Presbyterian) Seminary in Chicago in "Parish Revitalization." My doctoral thesis was entitled "Strangers in Town: How One Roman Catholic Mission Church Dealt With Environments (internal weakness and rejection from the outside)"
(5) At the Cathedral, I led a congregation that grew from 110 to 2100 members by specializing in reaching out to marginal, left-out, excluded, rejected and hurting Catholics. I was co-founder of the Cathedral Heritage Foundation (later called Center for Interfaith Relations) that still exists today. We built a new kitchen for the homeless, supported St. John Day Center for the the Homeless and sponsored an annual Dessert Festival to help house AIDS patients when AIDS was first discovered.
(6) For 15 years, I wrote a weekly column in our diocesan newspaper, THE RECORD, called "An Encouraged" directed at discouraged, rejected, left-out and marginalized people, especially hurting Catholics.
(7) While I was a weekend campus minister at Bellarmine University, I offered an annual "Blue Christmas Mass" for several years for the grieving - those who had lost loved ones, but could not identify with the normal happy Christmas Masses offered in their parishes.
(8) While a seminary staff member at St. Meinrad, I annually hosted a Thanksgiving dinner for "those left behind" - the international seminarians studying at that seminary who could not go home to their families. I started a program there called "World Priest" that helped immigrant priests adjust to American culture and serve in American parishes. I bought them clothes, helped them with spending money and made sure they could afford class trips.
(9) After retirement, I volunteered to work in the Caribbean Missions, making 12 trips and raising over $1,250.000.00 in financial aid, especially to the Diocese of Kingstown in the poor country of St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
(10) I raised the awareness of my small hometown parish of its connection to 19th century slavery, honored all 222 of our enslaved members in a museum room in a totally renovated closed school that I turned into a rural eco-friendly family life center and restored the tombstone of Father Augustus Tolton's enslaved grandmother, Matilda. Father Tolton is the United States' first slave-to-priest who is up for canonization. Father Tolton's enslaved mother, Martha Jane, was baptized and confirmed in my home parish. Because of these efforts, 35 bishops came to visit the grave of Father Tolton's grandmother last Fall.
(11) Recently, I have been involved in the missions of west Africa by agreeing to sponsor a Tanzanian seminarian, helping a family add to their house and raising the funds to build a new stone St. Veronica Church, and furnishing it, in Kenya.
Yes, I feel deeply that the election of Pope Leo XIV has validated my fifty-five years of ministry at a time when I thought the Cardinals might elect a Pope who would try to take us back to some imagined "good old days." His election has made me feel that maybe I have not been blind, deaf and dumb all these years after all! Along with Pope Leo, we old missionaries like to say, "Once a missionary, always a missionary!" He will no doubt, like Pope Francis, continue to "Make the Church Outward Looking Again."
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