Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Jim Harvey in the dusk of a life of mercy/Gumbleton, reflects on Bourgeois, calls for tolerance, openness

Published on National Catholic Reporter (http://ncronline3.org/drupal)

Jim Harvey in the dusk of a life of mercy

By NCR SOA

Created 11/29/2008 - 16:43

By PATRICK O’NEILL

COLUMBUS, GA
Dying from cancer, and in hospice care, Jim Harney was not able to come to the annual School of the Americas Watch gathering this year, but Harney’s friend, Scott Wright, wanted to make sure that Harney’s life commitment to a more peaceful and just world was made known to the newest generation of activists.

Wright and his wife, Jean Stokan, distributed copies of a six-page tribute to Harney, who as a young priest in the late 1960s spent 18 months in federal prison for destroying draft files as a member of the Milwaukee 14, a group opposed to the Vietnam War. The six pages include several pieces of Harney’s writings and his photographs.

Harney is a professional photographer who traveled the world to take pictures of poor and oppressed peoples.

“For the last forty years, Jim Harney has moved thousands of people and audiences through his photographs and stories taken on numerous trips to places of great suffering and hope,” Wright wrote. Those journeys included war zones in El Salvador, accompanying refugees in flight, numerous other trips to Latin America and a 2002 trip to Iraq with Voices in the Wilderness six weeks before the US attacked Iraq.

In 1968, Gordan Zahn invited Harney to write the preface for his highly regarded biography, “In Solitary Witness,” about the refusal of Austrian peasant Franz Jagerstatter to fight in Hitler’s army, a refusal that resulted in Jagerstatter being executed by the Nazis.

In that preface, Harney wrote: "As we move into the future the family of man desperately seeks those who have within them the capacity to discern and act upon human needs -- the capacity to cry out in collective witness against the atrocities that are taking place in the world, to take the leap into history and to live with suffering humanity. History cries out for our witness.”

When he received the news in July that his cancer was terminal, Harvey decided to embark on a pilgrimage from Boston to New Haven, CT in solidarity with undocumented Latinos who come to the US in search of work.

“My idea is to spend my last days with the undocumented human beings of Central America who are walking to get to the United States,” Harney said in an August interview during the pilgrimage.

Harney has “continued to be a prophetic voice for justice" in solidarity with Third World peoples, Wright told NCR.

Harney is in hospice care at his home in Bangor, ME, where he is also being cared for by his partner, Nancy Minott. For more information, go to: www.posibilidad.org [1]. You may write to Harney at 85 Wiley St. Bangor, ME 04401.

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Published on National Catholic Reporter (http://ncronline3.org/drupal)

Gumbleton, reflects on Bourgeois, calls for tolerance, openness

By NCR SOA

Created 11/23/2008 - 09:44

By PATRICK O’NEILL

COLUMBUS, GA
While nothing was said about the impending excommunication of Maryknoll Fr. Roy Bourgeois at Saturday night’s massive Jesuit vigil mass, concelebrant, Detroit auxiliary Bishop Thomas Gumbleton did offer words of support for the founder of the School of the Americas Watch movement.

In an interview with NCR following the Mass, Gumbleton said Bourgeois will be excommunicated for his support and for his participation in the Aug. 9 ordination of Catholic priest, Janice Sevre-Duszynska.

“He’s going to be excommunicated, there’s no question about it,” Gumbleton said. “I think it’s an unnecessary penalty.”

The Pax Christi USA cofounder and Detroit bishop said the Church does not typically excommunicate people for all sorts of moral wrongs.

“If you’re going to excommunicate somebody for something like that, you probably ought to excommunicate people for being willing to use nuclear weapons. And we have lots of people in the military that are committed to using them if the order comes.

”If you’re going to be a Church that pushes penalty against people, well then there’s lots of penalties you could impose for many different kinds of terrible things.

“In the eyes of the Holy See, this seems to be a very grave matter. Well, if it is so grave it deserves excommunication, well then there are certainly other things that are graver that deserve excommunication.”

Gumbleton said the Church needs to return to the mood of tolerance and openness expressed during the Pontificate of Pope John XXIII, who said the Second Vatican Council “is not going to issue any condemnations. It s going to be a pastoral council. We’re going to try to draw people in, not drive people away. And that’s the kind of Church we need right now very much.”

Quoting Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini of Milan, Gumbleton said: “The Church is losing its credibility because they focus on issues of sexuality and don’t have a good understanding of it, that doesn’t touch the lives of people, and he mentions Humanae Vitae specifically. He said we turn people a way, and we should be drawing them back. I agree with him.”

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Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218.  Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net

 

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

 

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