NEW EVANGELIZATION NEEDS THE GOSPEL TRUTH -- AND A MOTHER'S DAY PAX CHRISTI

 

I am a member of Pax Christi USA because it means Peace of Christ, not war of Christ, and we as a church must follow this faith in its full gospel, no matter how difficult, in a violent war-dedicated society.  We are given the call and grace to do this by the resurrected Jesus, who breaths on us, “Peace be with you.”

As we look forward as a church to a new evangelization of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the first step is to fully proclaim that Good News.  Every person on the planet, no matter culture or background, churched or un-churched, must answer two primary questions—Is there a God? – And if there is a God, what does that creator and perfect being want me to do with my life?  Christians have been blessed with the answer of Jesus. 

If we believe Jesus is the Son of God, then it’s crucial to follow the advice of his human mother Mary, “Do whatever he tells you.” [Jn 2:5] The account of his life, death, and resurrection is truly Good News—there is life after death for those who trust in his way.  He has shown us how to live and die, and live again.  He never sanctioned taking another’s life as the way to salvation, but taught and did the opposite, giving his own life.

 

So there is a dilemma for those of us who want to evangelize others to follow the all-merciful all-loving nonviolent Jesus who loved even the enemy.  What are we to do about our support of a “just war theory”—war which kills on a massive scale.  How will they know we are Christian’s by our love?  We reject a just abortion theory, but we maintain the justified violence of war.  This is just a theory, and not an original dogma of our faith, yet it has caused immeasurable havoc and suffering.

Image by Tom Gauld of the Guardian

 

Who revealed to us the “just war theory”?  It was not Christ, God’s only Son.  Cicero, a B.C. orator and senator of the Roman Empire, was its first formulator.   Be willing to kill for the kingdom, take up your sword—give this a framework of ethical principles.  We find this thinking nowhere in Christ’s Gospel, only in a secularized script—materialism dressed up as religion.  For the first 300 years of Christianity, you could not be a Christian and be a soldier.  For more on this please view Fr. E.C. McCarthy’s presentation Introduction to the History,Theology and Spirituality of Gospel Nonviolence.

Yesterday was Mother’s Day, and we have words of inspiration from its founder, a more  contemporary Christian, Julia Ward Howe in 1870 – "Our sons [and daughters] shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
to allow our sons [and daughters] to be trained to injure theirs."
Another Mother's Day is celebrated without taking this proclamation seriously.

o do so, and to follow Christ, we must stop sending our children off to war, mortgaging their future by funding war instead of their education.  We must send them into service as peacemakers, to battle the triple evils-- racism, poverty, and war itself-- that plague our world.  Then on that judgment day we’ll hear God say, -- Blessed are you peacemakers, My sons and daughters.  All of us Catholics, Christians, young and old, are called to be active witnesses, risking everything for this truth.  Violence is never the way.  God is unconditional love.  There is no place for violence in the Holy of Holies, God’s heart of hearts.

 

A conservative's belief

 

 

 

Illumination by Kathy Brahney

 

 

EXPAND MICHIGAN MEDICAID---AS STEP TOWARDS MEDICARE FOR ALL

 

 Let's follow the better medical instincts of this southern state representative & physician -- expand Medicaid to more of those in need of healthcare.  Someday soon,in this world's richest most blest country, a fully funded Medicare sysem should be available to all.

 

This week our local paper gave its editorial support to Medicaid Expansion-- health coverage for more low income Michigan citizens. On the same opinion page, the CEO’s of our three county hospitals wrote an op-ed arguing also that our Michigan legislature should pass a budget that will accept the federal funds for this expansion. The problem is, as State Rep. Paul Muxlow wrote me in recent correspondence,

 

“Unfortunately, Medicaid Expansion was not contained in the House of Representatives Omnibus budget for this year. However, there is still a possibility that Medicaid Expansion could find its way in the budget.  Unfortunately, Medicaid Expansion was not contained in the House of Representatives Omnibus budget for this year. However, there is still a possibility that Medicaid Expansion could find its way in the budget, following a conference committee, which will form to address differences contained in both the Senate's budget bill, and the House of Representatives' bill. ”   Doesn’t sound too hopeful.

 

Why wouldn’t our representatives want this federal money, to help in our state’s healthcare needs? They cite the eventual obligation that the state pay for 10% of the increased coverage [the feds still to pay the remaining 90%].  Let’s hope aversion to federal ObamaCare by our state’s Republican controlled legislature doesn’t cut off this access to healthcare for our less fortunate.

 

’ve worked twenty years as a healthcare provider in our Port Huron community, and have seen both doctors and patients struggle with cost of healthcare and ability to pay issues. We need to give low income people better access, and physicians more consistent reimbursement for care given {Medicaid routinely pays only about 50% of what the other insurers do}. My email response to Rep. Muxlow, who has been one who can put aside partisanship, is as follows.

Do you have any conference committee influence to put Medicaid expansion back in the MI budget? It would be good to see some Republican support for the common good--this increased access to Medicaid. It’s also consistent with the Right to Life we both support. Our Medicaid does not pay for abortion, and does pay for the pregnancy needs of the low income people we see in our Blue Water Pregnancy Care Center where I volunteer as a male advocate. I feel the budget should not pass until this Medicaid expansion is included. How will you vote?   I hope you, and your colleagues Rep. Andrea LaFontaine, Dan Lauwers, and Sen. Phil Pavlov also, along with all legislators, will find a way to vote positive for healthcare in St. Clair County, and Michigan as a whole.  As a scriptural incentive, it would be a good time for us all to read the Gospel account [Lk 16: 19-31] of the rich man and Lazarus at the Gate {whose sores never received care in his lifetime, except by licking dogs}.  The consequences for the the rich man never taking notice, were eternal.   Yours truly, Michael McCarthy PA-C

 

Lazarus and the Rich Man ---        Before 

and After
 

 

 

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” -- Dr. Martin Luther King

 

"The truth is that it is impossible to interpret Jesus as violent. Violence is contrary to the Kingdom of God. It is an instrument of the Antichrist. Violence never serves man, but dehumanizes him.”

--Pope Benedict XVI, Angelus Address, Sunday, March 11, 2012

"Apathy, in the face of relievable human misery, is radical evil."
        -- Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy


Illumination by Kathy Brahney

AN AFRICAN- AMERICAN WHO RETURNED TO AFRICA, AND TOLD US THE TRUTH

Dr. Dubois of Harvard and Fisk

 

The tall young African docent at the W.E.B. Dubois museum in Accra didn’t hesitate at the end of the personal tour he’d given me alone when his colleagues had been ready to go home.  “What book of the famous man would he recommend me to read?  The Souls of Black Folk.”   One of the buildings we’d visited held the tomb of the eminent scholar who’d returned to the homeland of his ancestors to finish his work. 

The docent had let me in just at closing time.  I’d come down the block from my brother’s apartment compound, adjacent to the new largest securitized U.S. embassy in Africa, because it was something I didn’t want to miss. My brother Dan had spent two years in the embassy doing immigration work, and my trip there came at the end of his assignment.  We’d done well visiting jungle forest and fishing boat coast, my first time in central Africa.  But here right next door was this monument to a black man who’d superseded slavery’s history, and wrote bravely about it at the beginning of the 20th century.  That’s all I knew of Dubois then.  I’ve just finished the book, and the docent was right.

Partially bunkered U.S. Embassy in Accra, Ghana--one of our newest and biggest {next to Iraq's}

 

We the whites, now begin to know the black of ages better, as we feel their suffered indignation in the face of the new master the corporate person who tells the 99% rest what to do—beyond the new grey-flannelled suit they are men who command many guns and dollars and people worldwide.  What are we to do then, beloved community, those who believe s, dismantle the veils.

Uncertain of source, but collaborated by NYT obit in 1963

 

Dubois teaches all the races something of the Veil, the sequestering of peoples to maintain control and privilege.  He describes the South, having entered from the North, with pain outrage empathy—and lays the problem at the door of the whole country.  His approach is measure by measure as firm uplifting as the hymns of the black church that connect each chapter, and leads with tough love through his educated social analysis, and stories of his own encounters.

escribing the history of our racism accurately from a hundred years ago, he gives compass to many of our current troubles.   The truth, and underlying compassion, of his words give hope that we shall yet overcome, as the banner was taken up by Dr. King, the triple headed monster—poverty militarism racism.  Lord give us the grace to find the courage. Grant us more prophets, and the good sense not to banish or kill them.

 

 

 

Illumination by Kathy Brahney

A PRE-911 PLEA TO END OUR NUCLEAR ADDICTION TO WAR--MISSILES UPON MISSILES

 

Hit and miss--see Arms Control Association for counterpoint overview on Missile Defense

 October 25, 2012 – A Terminal High Altitude Area Defense -THAAD- interceptor missile is launched from Meck Island [Marshall Islands, South Pacific] on its way to an intercept of a ballistic missile target during MDA’s historic flight test - U.S. Navy photo

Sent May 8, 2000       

 

Dear President Bill Clinton,

      You have a few months left to give the people of this country something of lasting value--a world working towards peace through nuclear disarmament.  This, the only political treasure worth having or passing on to our citizens, can be your legacy.  While peace through weapons is the lie that has killed millions down the millennia. 

      Now we have the zenith of weapons madness--the nuclear arms race.  We have the hugest surplus of nukes; the Russians have too many and don’t have the means to get rid of them; the bombs never helped either country; we don’t want any new countries to have them [foreshadows Iraq, Iran, N Korea]; we say we want to get rid of them.  Yet we will not stop testing, designing, and building new ones.  We shot down the Comprehensive Test Ban.  And now we risk destroying the small limits of the START nuclear arms treaties, by violating the ABM treaty--setting up our own limited missile defense system. 

      We appear to be making up our own rules.  We have the best and most nuclear weapons so we’ll sit pretty with them thumbing our nose at the rest of the world and trying to put up a technologically imaginary ABM Star Wars [President Reagan’s brainchild] system to protect ourselves and our missiles.  And then we tell them not to build any nukes themselves.  Non-proliferation for you guys, nuclear weapons plus for us.  This is the incredible arrogance of people in Congress like Jesse Helms and the weapons merchants and ballistic think-tankers he and others like him represent.

      I heard the very depressing commentary of Daniel Schorr on NPR, May 1st [I hope you will listen to it if you haven’t already--see web address below – Unfortunately no longer available ].  He describes the machinations of these nuclear death star true believers, and how they’ve completely lame-ducked you on disarmament.  Don’t let them do this.  You can banish the influence of those who’ve been sitting in smoke-filled rooms endlessly planning more deadly missiles to protect their scandalous wealth.

      Say right now that there will be no Star Wars ABM system--limited or not.  What need for further tests in June, or ever?  Go to Russia, more a statesman than any we’ve had in the past 100 years, and negotiate deep reductions in nuclear weapons beyond START II into START III, until they are finished, gone.  And we can begin to base our national security on something other than the most lethal machines ever devised, and start having a real peace dividend--work on health, education, and creative ecologically responsible energy technology, becoming true leaders of a free world.

      It is high time your presidency took the high road.  Put the weaponeers on notice that they no longer run our country [as President Eisenhower on his retirement suggested we do].  We can then forthrightly tell the rest of the world, Iraq, North Korea, Israel, Pakistan, India, etc., not to build nuclear bombs.  These are the doomsday virus, still exceeding virulent, that we cannot let proliferate.  More important than any national health plan.  A let the world live plan.  Be the disarmament president!  Lead the nation to renounce its inordinate belief in, and addiction to, all weapons great and small. 

      I’ve seen the photograph of you as a high school student shaking President Kennedy’s hand.  He would want you to do this.  Thank you for your consideration.  Hillary and Chelsea will thank you as well.

Yours truly,

Michael J. McCarthy PA-C

 

 

P.S.  I was a high school student in those same years as your photo, and also went to Boys State, in Michigan.  I’ve been truly blessed with my wife Andrea and four children, Maura 20, Sam 18, Kathleen 15, and Bridget 13.


Still awaiting response

Early in the George W. Bush administration the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty was broken--in favor of implementing some small unproven measures of nuclear self defense, and a certain acceleration of the nuclear arms race worldwide, as all capable countries are goaded into a widening spiral of weapons of mass destruction one-ups-manship.  President Obama so far continues to allow pursuit of this defense industry's self-defeated notion of nuclear security.

The Whole World in Her / His Hands

Respect all life this earth day

HAPPY APPALACHIAN TRAILS, AND BOSTON MARATHON TRAGEDY

St Paul's Church Harvard Square, The Berkshires--Appalachian Trail, Boston Marathon victim 2013 {NYT photo}

Daily mass had been delayed an hour till 9am “due to the holiday” as posted by 8 x 11 sheet on the church doors, April 15.  While waiting, I sat in the sunshine on a small Harvard diag building’s side-door steps, a block from St Paul’s. For some reason the beauty of the manicured walks with spring flowering in the beds and trees, made me think of the crisis of conscience for those dedicated to violence--that God’s merciful sunshine is the only solution to this darkness.

First I remembered a film I’ve seen with a Palestinian strapping on his bomb vest, culmination of injustices and insults, urged on by others—but in the end stripping off his bombs, after unable on the bus to take Israeli children with him to his death.

Can bombers reject their violence? Then I was filled with a hope that all of us, connected to bombs deployed all over the world in terrible violent response to conflict, will strip off our bombs. We are all bombers. Look clearly at what almost half of our federal taxes have purchased.

When mass had finally begun  IRS Tax Day, I voiced the Offertory intention, “On this Patriot Day [local Massachusetts holiday commemorating Paul Revere’s revolutionary ride and war's beginning] which is also "National Tribute Tax to Caesar Day", help us re-dedicate our resources to following Jesus’s way of nonviolent love, and we pray blessings for Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy’s preaching of the spirituality / theology of God’s nonviolent love.”  The good Father presiding at mass, completed the petition, “We pray to you Lord.” The 20 or so people present, young and old, responded, “Lord hear our prayer.”

At the doors of church after Fr. Salzmann informed me in a nice way that at their church they don’t have open mass intentions at the Offertory.   I’d spoken out of turn, but he said that was OK, I didn’t know, and agreed at my suggestion that he’d consider Fr. McCarthy as a speaker for their Theology on Tap gatherings. Send him more info.

Our daughters Maura and Kathleen had joined us for beautiful early spring hikes on the Appalachian Trail this past weekend, and we were heading home Monday afternoon, after having left Boston that morning from Maura’s Cambridge apartment.  We heard by cell phone —2 killed, 26 injured {numbers since multiplied} at the Marathon finish line.   Tragedy of senseless violence!  No amount of homeland security, or violence on foreign soil, can deflect it.

As the horrible carnage of yesterday’s bombs in Boston command our attention, let’s not forget the daily human destruction caused by the bombs we’ve deployed.  We heard an 8 year old child died at the Marathon finish line attack.  No one yet knows the attacker[s].  Almost every day one who reads the NY Times or Wall St Journal will see reports of innocent people killed as collateral damage in our interminable War on Terrorism.  Drones and smart bombs are not surgeons.

The only way to defeat the worldwide culture of death is by offering our first fruits to the life-giving God of mercy and love.

Memorial marker we passed on the trail--to Shay's Rebellion, a post-Revolutionary War tax revolt by farmers & small landholders.   Next time, Lord, without guns or bombs.

PEACE, NOT WAR, TAX BONDS

 Couldn't resist changing the imposed title

 

I reprint above an oped from May 24, 2007.   The wars have shifted focus, from Iraq-Afghanistan on through Libya to Syria and beyond.   The problem is not just the particular battlegrounds, but our war economy itself.  We have become dependent on war and violence.  We try to just export it for foreign influence, but it keeps rebounding back to us in assault weapon massacres, and in so many ways we’ve come to mistreat each other.  Rich vs. poor, healthy vs. sick, ivy-covered educated vs. those taught less than bare minimum.

nce again I hope we can spiritually review at tax time, how we spend our money as a country, and turn from the works of war, to the works of peace.  Previous efforts outlined above faltered, as President Bush’s 2008 tax rebate program eventually deducted the tax debt we’d with-held, collecting the money from checks issued, effectively ending our efforts.

 

May we persist and be re-inspired, to non-cooperate with evil, as we seek to cooperate with and serve the good.  Lord, we believe, help our unbelief.

Ande McCarthy, Lyn Chabot, and Library Director Jim Warwick -- April 17, 2007

 

 

Illumination by Kathy Brahney

Another source of good information on how to proceed --

 

EASTER COMES - HOPE SPRINGS - FROM NURSE ANDE

Ande Gaines McCarthy R.N. - this winter recording a VNA visit on tablet computer--her snowflake art in background

et me tell you about Ande,  my love and counterpoint inspiration for 35 years now.  She can be as aggravatingly stubborn as I am, always has her own opinion, eventually making mine better through the contest of mind and spirit.  Mine, the realm of principle, striving for truth in politics and faith.  Hers, the direct intimate care of people, now her elderly patients on deaths’ door—earlier on, of our kids, helping them take on the world, teasing them into life’s joy and beauty at every opportunity.

She wants everyone to get moving, do something, make music, most of all have fun.  She’ll tickle it out of you, young or old, family or not, no matter the Detroit blunt cut downs, or “praise the Lords” on high, it might take.  Always ready to break out in tears of deep silent resonance, when the feeling’s right and beautiful.  That happens often.

Ever since high school she’s wanted to be, and is, a nurse.  She’ll keep caring for us all, from kids in war-torn Afghanistan, to our children and grandkids, to her Marwood sick and old friends {remaining from before her mom died there}.  All are welcome, included in her care, as long as she’s given time on this planet.

As I tilt with my pen, and projects, against the giants of poverty-racism-militarism, I see her now by my side in the different but same battle, and realize how much I’ve been blessed—how much I love her.  She constantly shows me new ways to cast out the darkness.  She reveals the sunshine of God’s love, to help warm our hearts, as many as she can, as the world struggles onward.

On our wedding day -- June 24, 1978

 

 

 

 

Illumination art by Kathy Brahney