Catholic Saints Unknown And The Unwisdom of Modern Canonization

For a change Religion Dispatches is about the best of religion instead of an opportunity to promote the alleged death of Christianity.   The piece which the playwright Gregg Mozgala remembers his friend, mentor and fellow disabilities rights activist, Fr. Rick Curry S.J. is a good reminder of what art at its best, in its greatest importance is for and what a life worth having lived is like.  Fr. Curry, a Jesuit was born without a right arm, was an example of both.




For people who don't yet have disabilities, it's hard to get your mind around the hunger that people with them, who grew up with them must feel for the ability to be with other people who understand their daily experience.  And of being disappeared by the media and the larger society.

I can remember, during one of my first nights in Maine the following summer, a few of us were hanging out in the living room area yucking it up and getting to know each other. A young man with a severe case of cerebral palsy—a wheelchair user who relied on a personal attendant—in the next room overheard us and threw himself out of his chair, dragging himself over to us so he could join the conversation. I saw a man who couldn’t walk without crutches suddenly get up and run to the front of a bar when he realized it was his time to sing karaoke (a miracle?), and I watched people from all over the country and the world sing and perform everything from show tunes to Shakespeare. For many, this was the first time they were in a community of other disabled people like themselves, where they felt valued as human beings and were given the space (literally a stage!) to express themselves.

As a man of the cloth and as an artist Curry understood that attending theatre is not unlike going to church. Many medieval plays were performed in churches and dealt with issues of morality, justice and the human condition. Beyond that, both theatre and religion give one a sense of community. There is pageantry and spectacle involved in both; one dresses up to go to the theater the same way one dons their “Sunday best” to attend services. There is the collective belief in something not seen that is bigger than oneself. Both experiences are ardent practices in faith.

I remember, back in the early 1970s when I first heard of the National Theater of the Deaf and saw some of their work on TV it struck me how incredible it must feel for people to find themselves in a situation, not only where they were with other people from their community, who shared their language, but to have an institutional, public venue in which their language, their experience, their lives were the norm, to have other deaf people be their public, others welcome but not the ones who it was for, first and foremost.  And I'd grown up having a disabled father.

It has to be significant that Fr. Curry's work, as well, centered around theater.  It is certainly significant that it came from his religious vocation, that radical egalitarian vision of society.   In one of those lectures I posted last week, David Bentley Hart talks about how incredibly insane the egalitarian assertions of Jesus had to have seemed among pagans whose view of life was based in inequality and the assumption that inequality was an expression of the will of the gods or some expression of fate if not an expression of merit in the person or family so favored.  The difference between that view of things and the Bible, in which the status of the Jewish people as being "chosen" certainly didn't mean that life was going to be nothing but good times ahead is not only notable, it's crucial in understanding what made it different, why it has persisted even as the old inequality has.  Christianity has been and is still an aspiration to be attained, it certainly was not and has not been a reality achieved.  Though in some individual lives, even in some notable examples of institutional life, great strides toward living the Christian life have happened.  From what I can read about the work of Fr. Curry, that was at the center of it.

--------

We are entering into one of the perennial repeats of Christopher Hitchen's ritual kicking around of Mother Teresa, the occasion is her impending canonization - of putting her into the official cannon of saints. I was never a great fan of the cult of personality that was raised around Mother Teresa, ironically much of it beginning in that most anti-Catholic of institutions, the BBC.   I don't think it was her finest period, when she went from a nun struggling to establish charitable institutions and efforts in which her lack of managerial experience, her naivety about modern medicine, sanitation, social issues,* etc. all became a problem.  I don't think she is to blame for a lot of it, she became a figure head into which a lot of people poured a lot of their own agenda.  I have to think she must have spent a lot of that time bewildered by it all, it must have been like being an unsuspecting rider of a rocket to which others had strapped her.

I don't think her canonization is a wise thing but no one asked me.  The problems with her order, with the institutions she founded will be made all important as her canonization becomes a weapon for anti-Catholics and anti-religious fanatics to wield.   Perhaps Pope Francis knows all about that and thinks there are better reasons for canonizing her, no one let me in on that, either.

As in the furor over the publication of her private diary and letters, what's most instructive isn't even her own mental state, she spent a large part of the time before she was famous feeling like even her religious belief had abandoned her.  For me that is what is truly heroic in her story, that she wasn't getting anything out of her labor in trying to take care of people who were entirely abandoned by the society in which they were dying, not even personal satisfaction, from the sound of it.  Yet she still did it in the years and decades before the idiotic Malcom Muggeridge turned her into a superstar.   I wonder if she might not have wished for that to go away sometimes.

It makes me wonder what will happen when one of my family heroes, Dorothy Day is canonized, as she will be.  What dirt the Christopher Hitchens crowd will try to dig up on her.   She was a lot more savvy than  Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu was and she never allowed herself to become the focus of the kind of publicity and fund raising machine that the elderly Albanian nun was turned into.  I can't help but get the feeling that Mother Teresa must have felt it was all unreal as compared to the stench, the dirt, the bodily secretions and sores, the human experience of real life.  I remember reading Dorothy Day talking about how the great city of New York dumped a street woman with a prolapsed rectum and other serious problems on her house of hospitality and the crisis it had presented to her always cash strapped and volunteer group.  You can ask the same thing about the responsibility of governments in India and elsewhere when it comes to the Sisters of Mercy.   If they had been taking care of those people, Mother Teresa wouldn't have found beggars dying in the street.  I have my problems with Mother Teresa as an international phenomenon and fund-rising cause, I can't help but think I have everything to learn from her in the period before she was famous.

*  In reading the recitation of individual examples when people being cared for in her institutions received inappropriate or incorrect care, in which there were wrong diagnoses, in which paliative care was inadequate and many other ways, I had to ask how much of the same can't be said every day about entirely secular and entirely up to date hospitals and health care facilities in the United States, Great Britain, France, etc.  And in those places there is no excuse of them being run by nuns who don't have the education or background to administer a modern healthcare institution.   It's not as if the secular health care systems around the world don't have similar problems of incompetence and failure to do what they know should be done.  I doubt that Mother Teresa was indifferent to the suffering of the most destitute of the street people of India, she certainly didn't just follow the local custom of just leaving them to the effects of their burden of karma or the American practice of trying to get out of caring for someone without insurance.   If she was to blame and it reflects badly on Catholicism or religion, why doesn't the frequently encountered indifference of modern medicine reflect badly on secularism and modernism?