Sermon during Mass of Resurrection for Nick Carroll

Sermon  during Mass of Resurrection for Nick Carroll,

Friday, August 20, 2010.

 

My dear People of God, a Phobail De, as the Irish has it, you are welcome and thank you for being present here today to celebrate the Mass of Resurrection in prayer for Nick’s eternal rest and to celebrate his life

 

 We express our sympathy to Nick’s sons Tim and Nick and to Maureen, Katie and Emma, their family.  We offer our sympathy also to Nick’s sisters Miriam, Joan and Ruth and to his brother Richard, as well as to Nick’s friend Janet and his many other relatives, friends and confreres.

 

We are fortunate in having a liturgy of prayer and music, reflections and readings that focuses on death as the gateway to new life, life everlasting.  The liturgy today resoundingly reminds us that life is changed, not taken away.  Nick is not gone from us he is gone before us, where he is we shall follow.

 

 Beautiful and hope- inspiring as our liturgy is, it does not take away the pain and horror of death.  When we think of death in a global perspective it is a terrible gash in the fabric of existence, its pain is felt in family life, in community life and across social and political domains.  Nick died at a ripe age, too soon of course for all who loved him, but still he lived a fulfilled life.  The gash in the fabric of existence is almost overwhelming when our minds travel to earthquake, flood and famine victims in Haiti, Niger, Pakistan, to other places in Africa, to the countless children and women and men slaughtered in Afghanistan, in Iraq, persons seeking jobs to feed their families but often dying from thirst in the Arizona desert and all the other places where life is so cheap.

 

 Nick, prophetic person that he was, had a very lively social conscience and he  would want us to be aware today that for the first time in history, one billion people, around one in six alive, are going to bed hungry every day.  In our own country with the largest economy on earth, the U. S. Department of Agriculture reported that in 2008, 49.1 million people at times lacked sufficient food.  Between the years 2006 and 2008 the number of children lacking sufficient food rose from 430, 000 to over one million.  The pope has described hunger as “the most cruel and concrete sign of poverty” and Catholic and other hunger relief missions and various dioceses are doing heroic work to alleviate hunger but the need is great.

 

Pakistan has around 20, million people homeless and hungry from flooding yet Pakistan spent $4.7 billion on armaments in 2007 and 2 days fighting by NATO and U.S. forces would give the U. N. the $ 500 million it needs for relief efforts in Pakistan. We may be sure that Nick would be busy raising consciousness and concern around these issues and he would want us to follow his example today in active celebration of his memory.

 

In his spiritual life Nick was committed to working for justice and to peace making through non violence.  He saw Catholic Social Teaching in its development as a continuation and application of Gospel values to contemporary situations especially where the poor and weak are oppressed by the rich and powerful.  He welcomed the emergence of Latin American theology of liberation in the 1960’s.  In essence the theology of liberation sees Jesus as concerned with liberating people from sin and all that oppresses them.  Jesus was concerned with reaching persons and promoting their human well being in this life.  First and foremost Jesus preached and inaugurated the kingdom or reign of God.  Jesus stood four square in the tradition of the great prophets of Israel who made a moral and religious breakthrough of enormous significance when they linked concern for the widow, the orphan, the day laborer and the alien with the practice of true religion. Jesus inaugurated the reign of God as he traveled around Galilee and contemplated the suffering of the small land holders and he proclaimed among these people the coming of an era of inclusive justice, justice for women, children, slaves and the peasant farmers.

 

Jesus modeled a new way for persons to be human together and in doing so he incurred the anger and hostility of powerful Roman, imperial rulers, and Jewish religious collaborators, who were threatened by his ideas and who plotted against him and had him tortured and assassinated as subversive and dangerous. 

Latin theologians of liberation rediscovered this historical Jesus as they themselves struggled for land, housing, jobs, food, and a human life free of hunger and oppression for themselves and their children in the 1960’s. These peasants and theologians perceived from the bible and their daily struggles that to know God is to do justice and to do justice truly is to know God.  And like Jesus the justice seeking peasants were tortured and assassinated.  President Ronald Reagan loosed a band of thugs and murderers in Nicaragua and 40,000 people were slaughtered.  Mr. Reagan called the Contra war mongers the ‘moral equivalent of the founding fathers’ in a travesty of history and decency. With U.S, military aid and money. 200, 000 mostly peasants, were slaughtered in Guatemala.   75, 000 people were slaughtered in El Salvador the great Oscar Romero among them. Romero the Bishop of the poor and advocate of nonviolence was vesting for Mass when he was shot on March 24, 1980.  The poor with wisdom greater that that shown in Rome already have proclaimed him a saint.

 

Persons, like Nick who knew what was going on in Central America and elsewhere and protested against it were declared subversive and accused of mixing politics and religion.  When religion for almost five centuries had sided with the wealthy and powerful that was considered acceptable but when God was spoken of as showing a love of preference for the poor and on their side in their struggles that was considered subversive and an unacceptable mixing of politics and religion.

The Eucharist we are celebrating in memory of Jesus’ command: “Do this in memory of me” has profound, social and political relevance.  The bread we break refers to Jesus’ life and death.  The wine refers to his life force to the passion for justice which marked his prayer and preaching.

 

 If you believe Jesus is present in our celebration today I invite you to join us at his table. We do so to keep our lives full of hope in a most difficult time in our Church’s history.  We live in a time of loss and pain.  We pray for the consolation of the Holy Spirit, for radical openness to the Gospel, for lives lived in love and in the quest for justice.  And we do so in solidarity with Nick whose prophetic life shone like a beacon for us.

 

Paul Surlis, St. Elizabeth Seton parish, Friday August 20, 2010

 

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