Bulletin reflection - the signs of the times - 25 October 2020 - St Jude Catholic Church - Pearl Mississippi

      Most of you know that before I became a priest, I taught high school in Greenville for four years as a member of the Mississippi Teacher Corps prior to entering seminary.  As a part of that experience, I received a grant from the US Department of Education to study in Argentina and Chile the summer of 2002.  It was an amazing experience to see those two countries first-hand and to learn so much about them.  Chile is considered one of Latin America’s success stories, having the highest per capita GDP in South America.  However, like in a lot of countries in the world, there is a lot of income inequality in Chile and a lot of people struggling to survive.  Catholicism is very strong in Chile as well.  One of my favorite saints, St Teresa of the Andes, a patron saint of the youth, was a Carmelite nun in Chile. One year ago in Chile, there were protests against poverty and income inequality.  This past weekend, Chile had street demonstrations to mark the one year anniversary of the protests. Last weekend, I saw that two large Catholic churches in Santiago, Chile, were burned down as a part of those protests.  

We have all seen photos of Catholic churches and statues of Catholic saints around the world destroyed or vandalized in recent months, even here in our own country.  An outside garden and statue were vandalized at St Richard in Jackson several months ago.  The mission of San Gabriel just outside of Los Angeles, one of the original California missions, was burned down in suspicious circumstances several months ago as well. All of this is very sad and very disturbing.  In the name of freedom of religion and in the name of people of good will, this violence and destruction is not acceptable.  In response, we not only pray, we speak up for our faith, and we look at those structures and sins in society that need to be changed.  However, as I said, such violence against our faith and our houses of worship is never acceptable.  We work for justice.  We perform acts of justice and mercy.  We are called to practice our faith to the best of our abilities with joy and with conviction.