St. Oscar Romero - Martyr for the Poor

 

Following is a homily by Deacon Marian Pawliszko delivered at St. Elizabeth Seton Parish, Newmarket, on 5th Sunday of Lent, 2021

On Wednesday, March 24, the Church will remember the anniversary of the assassination of recently canonized St. Oscar Romero, the Archbishop of El Salvador. Oscar Romero is probably known to many of you. He was murdered by government agents while presiding over mass in the hospital chapel on the 24th of March 1980.

Voice of the voiceless poor
Archbishop Romero had used his position to speak up against all kinds of social injustices. He was the “voice of the voiceless poor.” He was denounced by the government and their allies as a political agitator and received constant death threats. But this never discouraged him from preaching against the social injustices that plagued his nation during the civil unrest.

In his homilies he spoke against violence and repression, and all kinds of discrimination based on the exploitation of the poor.

He said that “preaching that does not denounce evil is not preaching the gospel… Preaching that awakens, preaching that illuminates, it can be compared to a light that comes on when people are asleep, naturally it will bother them. This is the preaching of Christ”. (Preached on January 22nd 1978)

At the mass in which he died, the gospel reading had been from the Gospel of John 12:23-26: “The hour has come for the son of man to be glorified…unless the grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain. But if it dies, it bears much fruit…” In the short preaching that would be his final homily, Archbishop Romero said: ‘You have just heard in the gospel of Christ that one must not love oneself so much as to avoid getting involved in the risks of life that history demands of us, and that those who try to fend off the danger will lose their lives. But whoever out of love for Christ gives himself to the service of others will live, like the grain of wheat that dies…only in undoing itself does it produce the harvest. Seconds after finishing his homily, a single shot rang out, fired from the back of the chapel which hit Romero in the chest. He was rushed to hospital but died in the emergency room shortly afterwards. The year before, he had said prophetically: ‘Christ is saying to each one of us: if you want your life and mission to be fruitful like mine, do as I have: be converted into grain that is buried. Let yourself be killed; do not be afraid. The one who avoids suffering will end up alone. There is no one more alone than selfish people. But if, out of love for others, you give your life for others, like I am going to give mine, you will have an abundant harvest; you will experience the deepest satisfaction.’ (Preached on April 1st, 1979)

Today's Gospel Reading [Jn. 12:20-33] reaffirms what has just been said. In a parable, Jesus said, "Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies; it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also."

Preferential option for the poor
To follow Jesus these days is not always easy. Many Christians in the Middle East and in all over the world are still unjustly persecuted today. There are still people who are preoccupying their worldly minds with wealth, violating the dignity of human life, not focusing on the preferential option for the poor, not to mention their ignorance towards the gospel values.

For three years Oscar Romero served as Archbishop, but his legacy is eternal, because it teaches us to build the beautiful structure of God’s Kingdom, that creates conditions of kindness, of trust, of freedom, of peace and of love even if we only accomplish a small fraction of God’s work in our lifetime.

Let us imitate Archbishop Romero’s courageous example as our model and guide to follow - and let us be mindful and stand up for social justice, always protecting and supporting those who are poor and marginalized in our society. As we approach the final two weeks of our Lenten journey let us deeply reflect on seeing God in the poor and being Jesus’ disciples in this world.

Giving in helpless passivity - Conference Reading

 

For almost all of his public life Jesus was actively doing something. 

However, from the moment he walks out of the Last Supper room and begins to pray in Gethsemane, all that activity stops. He is no longer the one who is doing things for others, but the one who is having things done to him. In the garden they arrest him, bind his hands, lead him to the high priest, then take him to Pilate. He is beaten, humiliated, stripped of his clothes and eventually nailed to a cross where he dies. This constitutes his “passion,” that time in his life where he ceases to be the doer and becomes the one who has things done to him.

What is so remarkable about this is that our faith teaches us that we are saved more through Jesus’s passion (his death and suffering) than through all of his activity and preaching and doing miracles.

There is a great lesson in this, not the least of which is how we view the terminally ill, the severely handicapped, and the sick. There’s a lesson too on how we might understand ourselves when we are ill, helpless, and in need of care from others.

The cross teaches us that we, like Jesus, give as much to others in our passivities as in our activities. When we are no longer in charge…humiliated, suffering, and unable even to make ourselves understood by our loved ones-then we are undergoing our own passion and, like Jesus in his passion, have in that opportunity to give our love and ourselves to others in a very deep way.

Rolheiser, Ron OMI, “The Passion and the Cross,” 2015, Franciscan Media, Cincinnati, p. 2 -3

Reading chosen by Deacon Steve

Image credit
Author: Nata Silina
http://www.supercoloring.com/coloring-pages/eleventh-station-jesus-is-nailed-to-the-cross

Does Canada need a law to combat environmental racism?

Image: Steve Greenberg

The following is an excerpt from...

Why Canada needs a law to combat environmental racism

Read the full article here

At a time when health and environmental crises dominate the public conversation, Black History Month in February was a stark reminder of the pervasive environmental struggles racialized communities, past and present, disproportionately face.

This month, there may be good news on the horizon. Nova Scotia Liberal MP Lenore Zann has introduced Bill C-230 in the House of Commons, the National Strategy to Redress Environmental Racism Act. It’s scheduled for a March vote.

The historical link between the civil rights and environmental justice movements is widely acknowledged, yet these struggles have become increasingly isolated over time. While environmental laws and regulations have grown exponentially since the NIMBY protests of the 1970s, the concerns of racialized communities have rarely, if ever, been at their forefront.

Instead, environmental governance and zoning regulations have often been deployed against the interests of Black, Indigenous and immigrant communities in North America. Well-known Canadian cases include Ontario’s chemical industry cluster that surrounds the Aamjiwnaang First Nation and Nova Scotia’s hazardous waste siting in historical Africville.

Environmental injustice is just one aspect of the systemic racial discrimination that continues to plague Canada from coast to coast to coast.

In December, researchers Amanda Giang and Kaitlin Castellani from the University of British Columbia published research showing that the cumulative air pollution burden in Canada’s three major cities (Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal) disproportionately affects racialized communities. In Montreal, immigrant residents consistently experience higher cumulative air pollution, while in Toronto, this burden falls on low-income residents. In Vancouver, it’s Indigenous residents. These disparities in exposure to air pollution are just one dimension of the generalized pattern of environmental injustice affecting historically marginalized groups: Indigenous Peoples, racialized newcomers and the urban poor.

Read the rest of this article here.

Environmental Racism

 

Environmental racism occurs when racialised communities are targeted for the establishment of environmentally hazardous sites and the subsequent neglect of those communities in relation to the cleanup of those sites, especially where this happens with respect to environmental policy-making by any level of government.

A private member's bill that aims to address environmental racism is headed for debate in the House of Commons this month.

According to a CBC news article: "Introduced by Nova Scotia MP Lenore Zann, Bill C-230 is seeking a national strategy to examine the link between race, socio-economic status and environmental risk, as well as the connection between hazardous sites and negative health outcomes in communities where Black and Indigenous people and people of colour live." Read the full article here: Bill that aims to address environmental racism heads for debate in House of Commons.

The bill was inspired by Ingrid Waldron, associate professor in the faculty of health at Dalhousie University in Halifax and author of "There's Something in the Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous and Black Communities", which in turn inspired the 2019 Netflix documentary featuring actors Elliot Page and Ian Daniel.

If you have Netflix, do yourself a favour and watch this documentary, "There's Something In the Water."