Monday, December 7, 2009

A local martyr, and a church

The bishop of Cleveland (facetiously associated with Lennongrad) will be taking St. Robert Bellarmine, after Christmas, on Sunday the 27th. For a time Sr. Dorothy (Sr. Laurentine) Kazel was a member and then teacher at St. Robert. She was one of the martyrs of El Salvador.

Here is a difference, if i may opine, in the church universal such an heritage would open the possibility of a church as site of pilgrimage, or a shrine. In the United States such tender, and eccentric sympathies, and sentiments are crushed by merciless institutional bureaucracy and fiat. It is an ugly universe where will trounces compassion. The sparing of such sites connects us with each other, this generation with that generation.

Saint Casimir was visited by Karol Wojtyla, whom later became pope John Paul II. Saint Lawrence was the home of the exiled bishop of Ljubljana, Gregorij Rožman. Saint Emeric was visited by József Mindszenty the Primate of Hungary and Archbishop of Esztergom. Saint Hyacinth was the boyhood parish of John Cardinal Krol, archbishop of Philadelphia. These four churches have been, or are scheduled to be, suppressed by Richard Lennon. They, along with St. Robert's, have been sites that have shared individuals and moments of history with the church on an international level. None of this has saved them from closure. One man, Richard Lennon, is denying the entire church, and its members, of these places and parishes to celebrate.
And certainly there are other stories to cherish.

The Lord is sweet to all: and his tender mercies are over all his works.—Psalmi cxliv. 9.
Let thy tender mercies come unto me, and I shall live: for thy law is my meditation.—Psalmi cxviii. 77. DRC

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