Harden not your hearts
At Mass this morning, our parish welcomed a visiting priest. Fr. Thomas Fenlon, pastor of St. Augustine Church in the Bronx, was in town for a family wedding, but he celebrated Mass and spoke about Catholic Relief Services (CRS) during his homily.
Fr. Fenlon recounted how he had visited Rwanda with fellow CRS priests and how the journey had transformed him. Rwanda, he told us, is the most Catholic nation in Africa and the most densely populated with 10 million souls sharing a nation the size of Maryland. Racial violence pits two tribes, the Hutus and Tutsis, against each other, even though all are Christians.
With horror, he told us about a Roman Catholic priest who invited members of an opposing tribe to enter his church and then ordered bulldozers to decimate everyone inside. Fr. Fenlon visited a memorial to ritual slaughter that left thousands of corpses of every gender and age as reminders of how the people of God harden their hearts. He took the phrase from today’s readings in Psalm 95: “Oh, that today you would hear his voice: ‘Harden not your hearts.’”
Fr. Fenlon urged our comfortable suburban church to support CRS as it continues assisting Catholics in other lands. Fair-trade coffee that puts more earnings in the hands of the poor who actually pick the coffee berries builds the body of Christ.
During a mission visit to Guatemala in 1999, I heard poor farmers talking about the low wages received from multinational corporations such as Dole and coffee barons for the fruits of their labors. We’ll be buying fair-trade coffee again.
By coincidence, CRS is featuring a campaign to end malnutrition in Guatemala as its lead story on its Web site. I worked in a tiny village an hour from the nearest town and I saw scrawny two-year-olds who couldn’t walk because they were too malnourished to stand up. I heard women tell me how many babies they lost in their lifetimes to treatable diseases. I spoke with men ashamed because they couldn’t make enough to feed their families. The meanness of poverty was everywhere, but I met so many beautiful people whose love of God was deep and genuine. They were rich in their love of God.
The shame of Rwanda’s slaughter has always been the role of religious more motivated by tribal loyalties than by the message of the Gospel they took a vow to live by. May God forgive their sins and may He keep their victims close to His heart.
