Happy Monday, Halo Fans, and welcome back to this week’s Lent Madness.
The wannabe Irishman in me was pleased that Brendan of Clonfert navigated his way to safe shores in the Saintly Sixteen.
It’s been said that Sunday morning is the most segregated time in American life. I certainly saw that first hand when my late wife and I would travel to Mississippi to visit her family. The family church was in an older part of town from which the white residents had largely moved away to newer suburbs. Nevertheless, the congregation remained almost entirely white. My first Christmas Eve there I asked Aunt Vera where the African Americans were. “Oh honey”, she drawled, “they have there own churches”.
If church life was that divided in the 1990s, imagine the racial and social forces arrayed against people like Jonathan Daniels thirty years previously. For liberals in the white American churches of that era, the Civil Rights struggle was the social justice issue of the day. Doubtless there were people then, as now in our congregations, who said that politics and church should not mix, but I think the testimony of the modern day martyrs like Jonathan Edwards and Rutilio Grande speak to the better angels of our consciences.
It’s impossible for me to make any conscious vote today other than to make a coin toss. But I will say that while Anglican clergy today in North America are safe to go preach and ally with the downtrodden, it is still very different in Latin America. The two Jesuit priests murdered by drug cartels in Mexico last year speak to the vital role of the Catholic Church as the voice of the poor and the indigenous in a part of the world that most of us only think of when we plan our winter getaways.
Blessed be their memories.
You can vote here:
https://www.lentmadness.org/2023/03/jonathan-daniels-v-rutilio-grande/#more-22249
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