On Friday, January 21, 2022, a seventeen year old student shot a fifteen year old student at Colonel Zadok Magruder High School. This has been a very traumatic event for the Magruder community of which includes many families from this parish. I was reading through guidelines produced by the National Child Traumatic Stress Network and thought that I would share a few of their tips of things that we can do for ourselves and things that we can do for our children after experiencing a school shooting.
Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno, Director of the Vatican Observatory, is someone whom I have followed now for a number of years. Smart and witty, he has written a number of articles and given a number of addresses that I have consistently found helpful. Recently I saw that Carol Glatz wrote in Catholic News Service about an article he had published in the Italian Jesuit Journal La Civiltà Cattolica. In that article Brother Guy stating that those who were stubbornly skeptical of science and those who eagerly embrace science as infallible both have a dangerous misunderstanding of the nature of science. This is the temptation to turn science or faith into a fortress against the basic and human fear of uncertainty.
Last October Cardinal Gregory celebrated a Mass at St. Matthew’s Cathedral to mark the opening of the Archdiocesan Synod that will be held over the next several months as part of the preparation for a Synod of Bishops that will be held in Rome in October 2023. You may be wondering: Why are we doing this? The answer is that Pope Francis wants to hear from the local Church about what is happening in local parishes. He and the bishops want to know what individuals think we should be doing to help make our parishes better. The Holy Father is proposing that we do this through a synodal process. Synod comes from a Greek word that means being on the road together or perhaps better, being on a journey together. This journey involves listening to the Holy Spirit and to each other in order to discern the path we are called to walk together.
January is Poverty Awareness Month. Pope St. John Paul II wrote in his encyclical On Social Concern (Sollicitudo Rei Socialis), no. 38 a useful description of Solidarity. There he said that “[Solidarity] is not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of many people, both near and far. On the contrary, it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself of the common good; that is to say to the good of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all.”