The Legacy of the Pope

Reverend Dr Cheri DiNovo

I tell a story when I preside over the funerals of women who’ve been loved well and loved well, known well yet none of them well known, about a conference I once attended where the speaker asked us all to call out the names of men who had a significant mentoring effect on our lives. The names of famous men were shouted, men who would be mentioned in history texts, all well known. Men like Gandhi, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and now, I’m sure, would be added the name of John Paul the Second. They were men who had no doubt accomplished much on the grand stages of our world, filled newspaper columns with enormous and often well deserved attention.

Then we were asked to call out the names of women who had changed our lives. Twice as many, no, three times as many, names were called out, none of them famous. They were the names of sisters, mothers, grandmothers, teachers, nurses, aunts, friends, mentors, editors, religious women, those that had ironed for, fed, cleaned for, nurtured, inspired, put words into the mouths of, and loved, not only the participants at that conference but also all those great men. It is at such moments as this, when the mainstream media is falling over itself to canonize yet another great man that those women rise in my consciousness. I dedicate this meditation to them.

Sue Fleming, who went from our Church to Malawi to work with AIDS orphans, of which there are thousands, told me a story. Malawi is a country like most countries, where women have little control over contracting the disease. Their husbands bring it home and no condoms are available. A woman who asked her man to use one would be branded ‘loose’ and shunned. The Churches preach celibacy or monogamy, neither of which works when a woman has little control over her marriage or her future. John Paul the Second at a speech given to the United Nations in 1994 condemned the use of birth control. An AIDS rights activist interviewed shortly thereafter said this would directly condemn hundreds of thousands to death, many of them women, many of them children. Sue quoted one of those women from Malawi, when she said, "The men are killing us."

A block down the street from our Church a golden statue of John Paul is covered in flowers and candles from folk, many of them Polish and Eastern European, for whom he was a powerful symbol in the resistance against totalitarianism. And he was. The Churches were centers of resistance. All the Churches were, where people gathered, workers, intellectuals, students, to combat a repressive regime. Yet in Ruanda where the repressive regime had a Roman Catholic face, the Churches became the killing grounds where bodies were heaped on bodies and a man, Romeo Dallaire, a faithful Roman Catholic Christian watched and was unable to do anything but watch. No help came to him from any of the world’s great men.

In the United States, over 11000 cases of sexual abuse at the hands of almost 7000 priests are before the courts and Bernard Law the Cardinal of Boston, the epicenter of scandal was forced to resign yet then was simply transferred to Rome where he will be one of the Cardinals responsible for electing the next Pope. I remember reading the story of one of those cases, a young boy, who repeatedly told adults that loved him and that he loved, about the abuse at the hands of his priest. "They did not believe me," he said, "My priest was charismatic and spiritual and our Church was overflowing with people who respected him. He was about to be made a Bishop. "Father would never do something like that", said my mother. "He is a great man"

In the Gospels, we are told the stories of Jesus’ death and resurrection. We are told how only a handful of followers followed him to the cross, mainly women. How only women saw the tomb empty and told the world of the miracle. We are told how Christ was recognized in the faces of ordinary people, the gardener, the breaker of bread, the wounded one. He did not appear in the palaces or in the Forums. He was not preceded by pomp and circumstance. His followers, despite their testimony, were hunted, persecuted, martyred. Their faces, his disciples, became like his face, noted by the breaking of bead, feeding the poor that is, by their woundedness and their ordinary work, tending creation and the created, like gardeners.

He did not make the history books. His life and death was inconsequential to every famous person and historian of his day. He was but a footnote, if that. Those that loved him told the stories of the miracle of his existence to each other. They kept him alive. Nobody for generations thought or perhaps was able, to write any of it down. They were the life that kept Him. He became the people. Not the wealthy, influential, headline making people. He became the poor, the worker, the wounded, the women. His followers, like him, were silenced. Their voices lost amidst the din of armies, and coliseums, the habits and intrigues of the famous.

I remember when I was in business walking down the halls of banks and multinational corporations and marveling at the faces immortalized in paintings. Paintings that hung in their foyers and boardrooms. Overwhelmingly male, they gazed at some distant ideal or future, I, as a woman had little idea about. Academia proved the same. Men in robes looked bravely and intelligently toward posterity. Church of course, is the same. Men, in photographs, look out on generations of parishioners, who, always and everywhere, mainly women, look back. The first Commandment says to have no other God but God. Idol worship whether of statues or men was a core tenant of Israel, one that Christian-Jews died for. "Christ is Lord", they cried while dying in the forums and prisons, "Not Cesar, or George Bush, or Tito, or any great man." "The men" said the Malawan woman, "Are killing us."

In the Vatican 15 old white men, followed by hundreds of other men will walk behind a great man this week, to honour the world-impacting life that he led. Outside thousands of women and ordinary people, gardeners, the wounded, the ones who bake and offer the bread, unable to find a place inside, will light candles. They, some of them, will whisper prayers to Christ, that humble one, that poor one, that sometimes unrecognizable one. Christ will smile from one to the other as unrecognized as on the Emmaus road, at least by most.

At the end of the fifteenth century, another great man nailed the 95 Theses to the door of a Church in Germany. He called for reforms to the Roman Church. He called for an end to the idolatry that he said had taken over the Papacy. He called for marriage for Priests. He called for an end to the clerical power that had sapped the laity. He called for a priesthood of all believers. He called for justification by faith alone and not by works however ‘great’. He called for a Church always and ever reforming itself in the light of the call of God upon it. He said words that describe the way I’m feeling right about now better than any others I could think of in this time of the almost total capitulation of the press and power to the Great Man mythology. He said, "Here I stand. I can do no other. May God help me."

Luther then went on to write about the inferiority of the Jews and inferiority of women and of the stupidity of the peasantry. I imagine in both his case and John Paul the Second, there were women and the poor and Jews as well as Hindus, Buddhists, Seikhs, Muslims, natives, who were unaware of what he had written . They either didn’t read the works of great white men or couldn’t read at all. Quietly, silenced, they went on changing lives and changing the world.

This is a prayer for them all.

 

Reverend Dr Cheri DiNovo is a Minister at Emmanuel Howard Park United Church in Toronto, Canada. Her sermons can be found at http://www.ehpchurch.org.