by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

Pope Francis: People, Let’s Be Free to Reason Together

      A few weeks ago, several dozen of us Georgetown faculty members and students met in the large conference room at the Berkley Center and watched Pope Francis’s address to a joint session of Congress. A lively discussion followed, although I was forced to duck in and out to reply to a raft of messages that came in after Francis put forward Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton—protagonists of my first book, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage—as “representative Americans” in their striving for the common good.

Now the Religious Freedom Project’s Nicholas Fedyk and I are picking up a thread of that day’s conversation and trying to carry it forward. On Cornerstone, Nick has posted a piece about the so-called “Francis effect” in world politics, and here I am following through with a reply.  

Taking off from Stalin’s famous quip—“How many divisions has the Pope of Rome?”—Nick cites Francis’s charisma and moral authority among world leaders to suggest how profoundly the political order has changed since Stalin’s time. Under John Paul II, and now under Francis, he declares, “The Church is eagerly reasserting its role in world affairs. Defying realist calculations of power, it relies on the force of ideas, not army divisions.”    

In particular, these popes have played the role of advocate for the idea of the common good and the idea of human dignity that underlies it:

"Constructivists have argued for the power and salience of norms for decades, including the value of human dignity. Many scholars, in fact, partially attribute the fall of the communism in Eastern Europe and Latin America to the dynamic leadership of John Paul II. More support for the common good lies in the increasing push for humanitarian action, which is spelled out in numerous international treaties and has formed the basis for a number of interventions—most notably in Kosovo, Libya, and Syria. There is a solidifying norm against the use and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons. States are even making efforts to limit emissions and industrial waste. All of these examples suggest that states may share an awareness of the common good.”

Nick goes on to emphasize their role as advocates of religious freedom, and it’s in this that I think there’s a further point to be made.

“How many divisions has the pope of Rome?” Stalin asked. The implied answer was, and is, “None.” Obviously, the Pope and the Church have something else. What it has, Nick rightly suggests, are ideas.    

So far, so good. But the power of its ideas derives from the fact that they are affirmed freely by well more than a billion people through countless individual acts of faith, conscience, and discernment. Francis, and the Church he leads, commands respect precisely to the degree that people bind themselves to the community of faith freely, without coercion, out of no state, ethnic, or other obligation—called there by an inner disposition (a movement of the spirit, if you will) that in the end it falls to them to discern and meet in response.    

Historically, the Roman Catholic Church’s relationship to the emerging idea of religious freedom is checkered at best—and this must be kept in mind always as Catholics take the lead in campaigns for religious freedom. So must the fact that in the Church’s recent history in this country—I mean the crisis of priestly sexual abuse and the cover-up by the bishops—church officials have used the idea of religious freedom as a means to evade public scrutiny, to duck pastoral and legal responsibility, and to resist censure and prosecution.    

So must the fact—clear from recent history in Western Europe—that people in free societies are free to change their religious “elective affinities” at any time and for any reason, and that many do so. In Western Europe, for example, two world wars and the sense that religion was, at best, ineffectual in ameliorating them and, at worst, a covert sponsor of the conflict, led tens of millions of Western Europeans to stand aside from the religious ideas that had animated Europe for a thousand years. This happened in a period when the Church in Europe enjoyed the very prerogatives of religious freedom—even religious domination—that are now said to be fatally imperiled in the United States.      

This truth, it seems to me, is the basis for an argument for greater freedom within religions—within the Roman Catholic Church, for example. It’s a commonplace that the Church is not a democracy. But what Francis has made clear, through his public statements and especially through his direction of the recent synod on the family, is that the Church is a community in which different people see things in different ways and that such freedom as the Church celebrates depends vitally on the ability of reasonable people to disagree, and then to discern the common good by reasoning together.      

In other words, the Church’s efforts for greater religious freedom in society depend on the integrity with which it allows and indeed sponsors reasonable disagreement internally as a means of discernment. Of course, there is a need for discipline and internal coherence, to a degree. But to what degree? Francis, with his profound appeal to Catholics and people of good will—people of distinctly different backgrounds and points of view—has left that question open, so that he and we, going forward, might answer it together.            

When the Pope Looked to Thomas Merton (1967 Edition)

     Not twenty-four hours after Pope Francis returned to Rome, John Carr – this must be record time – has organized a public conversation at Georgetown on “The Francis Effect” as seen on Francis’s visit to the United States, and it’s a sure bet that something like 600 people will show up.

Myself, I am still trying to see the visit clearly – and trying to understand the significance of Francis’s emphatic presentation of Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton as “representative” figures.

My first thought is that Day and Merton don’t need a papal seal of approval – although it sure comes in handy.  Their lives and work have an integrity all their own.  Francis’s attention has to do with affinity rather than authority.   

My second thought is that Merton, at least, was singled out by a pope once before. Actually, twice before. It involved a text Merton was asked to write in 1967, apparently at Pope Paul VI’s initiative.   The story is told in The Life You Save May Be Your Own, as follows:

**

Merton had received an invitation from Rome.  The Congress of the Laity would be followed by a synod of bishops, and the pope, through two Italian Trappists, asked Merton to contribute to a statement on the contemplative life.

The pope’s request arrived August 21, 1967 … [Merton] put a piece of paper in the typewriter, rapped out the date, and begged off the task. A big statement about contemplation, he explained, would alienate the honest searcher the bishops were hoping to reach. Besides, he was no expert in contemplation. He could not speak for the order. All he could do was write in his own words, one sinner to another.

He wrote all this; and as he wrote, the letter, addressed to the Trappist superior in Rome, became a letter addressed to “my brother who is in the world and who more and more often comes to me with his wounds which turn out to be also my own.” Twenty years earlier Merton had concluded The Seven Storey Mountain with a poem addressed to his brother, the dead airman, and in a sense all his work since then had been directed toward his brother in the world, a person distinct from him , unlike him, yet joined to him beneath it all. This time he began by apologizing for the one-sidedness of the dialogue— for speaking without being asked , and from behind the high wall of a monastery. The wall, he thought, was a problem to them both , yet he still believed that he belonged there. Why was he a monk?

Can I tell you that I have found answers to the questions that torment the man of our time? I do not know if I have found answers. When I first became a monk, yes, I was more sure of “answers.” But as I grow old in the monastic life I become aware that I have only begun to seek the questions. And what are the questions? Can a man make sense of his existence? Can a man honestly give his life meaning merely by adopting a certain set of explanations which pretend to tell him why the world began and where it will end, why there is evil and what is necessary for a good life? My brother, perhaps in my solitude I have become as it were an explorer for you, a searcher in realms which you are not able to visit—except perhaps in the company of your psychiatrist. I have been summoned to explore a desert area of man’s heart in which explanations no longer suffice , and in which one learns that only experience counts.

It is a beautiful and powerful answer, rooted in the sense of place that is basic to Merton’s spirituality, cast forward for the age of the space program and transcendental meditation . Still, the question remains: Why be a monk? Why be a believer at all? Merton’s answer is blunt. Because the desert place in each of us—“ an arid, rocky, dark land of the sou!”— is the place Christ came to earth to save. After two thousand years, he acknowledges, the language of faith engenders such distrust that “you do not know whether or not behind the word ‘cross’ there stands the experience of mercy and salvation, or only the threat of punishment.” But he can vouch for the cross with his own experience—“ can say to you that I have experienced the cross to mean mystery and not cruelty, truth and not deception.”

He speaks with the authority of the holy; but in the present age, when, he allows, the holy is found as often outside of the churches as inside, why should his brother seek God through religion at all? He answers again with his own experience, which is that God is a being to be known, not a problem to be solved, “and we who live the contemplative life have learned by experience that one cannot know God as long as one seeks to solve ‘the problem of God.’ To seek to solve the problem of God is to seek to see one’s own eyes.” God yearns to be known; human sadness is God’s sadness at not being known; and the contemplative is a person who recognizes that he or she is a temple of the Holy Ghost, and that the desert is a place where God is to be found. 

“Indeed we exist solely for this, to be the place he had chosen for his Presence,” he declares. “If once we began to recognize, humbly but truly, the real value of our own self, we would see that this value was the sign of God in our being, the signature of God upon our being.” In the lives of most of us, God’s signature is shown to us in the love of others. The monk, seemingly in flight from love, aims behind his wall to remain open to God wholly and directly. 

“The message the contemplative offers you, then, brother,” Merton declares, “is not that you need to find your way through the jungle of language and problems that today surround God; but that whether you understand or not, God loves you, is present to you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you, and offers you an understanding and light which are like nothing you ever found in books or heard in sermons”: a radiant understanding like the union of self and other in love. In closing, he tells his brother that he loves him.

The letter—“ written in haste”— has the lucidity that his encounter with Camus had led him to strive for, that of a man who understands and loves his condition, with all its limits and complications.

It was not what Rome had asked for, however.  Rome had asked for a statement to the Church’s bishops, explaining the contemplative life in expressly Catholic terms. The deadline was approaching. He was depressed and lonely. He had the flu. He spent the weekend in bed in the hermitage, reading Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying —“the central part, the crossing of the river, and the chapter on Addie, and was simply floored by it.” Then he put a fresh sheet of paper in the typewriter and started over.

**

I just swapped messages with a writer with whom I worried the distinction between “Catholic-themed” literature and literature attentive to the core questions of belief.  

What do I have in mind by the latter?  Merton’s “Message to Contemplatives” gives the idea.

More tomorrow on his second run at it.    

Francis’s Four “Representative Americans”: Four Great Writers

     Already it seems so long ago that Pope Francis, speaking to a joint session of Congress at the Capitol, organized his remarks around four “representative Americans”: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr. – and Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton.  

Spoken – and, as far as I could tell, written – in English, the address was a rhetorical and homiletical masterstroke.   Addressing a group of elected representatives, Francis put forward representatives of the striving for the common good that was his subject.  Expected to speak about policies, he put the emphasis on people.

The papal visit, my essays about the visit for vanityfair.com, and attention following on Francis’s address to Congress have kept me away from this site – away to the point where I felt something like homesick.   Even before the event began I got emails from reporters who knew that Day and Merton are two protagonists of The Life You Save May Be Your Own, and the next few hours were a flurry of compact commentary, as I tried to characterize in few sentences people whose life stories are told in 500-plus pages in the book.

On Merton, for the Times: 

He’s a man who through his writing made the search for God in a Catholic monastery seem a particularly modern and American adventure.

To the Washington Post, whose reported asked what stood out about the four figures Francis chose:

He put forward three nonviolent figures; out of the four people he mentioned, three were categorically against violence. To do that in front of Congress shows that he himself is a radical.

To CNN, whose reporter sought to stir up the “scandal” of Dorothy Day’s early life:

What’s made her controversial, while being considered for sainthood, is not these matters but rather her position as a pacifist and anarchist who opposed all war and called out bishops who failed to do the same… . During the Cold War, most notably, she spoke out against American militarism, “in the name of Catholicism,” while criticizing bishops who backed America’s policies.

The speech was an extraordinary moment for American Catholicism.  We knew that Day and Merton were great and holy and worth putting alongside President Lincoln and Dr. King; still, it was moving, and a little vindicating, to hear our “representatives” called out by Pope Francis and characterized so aptly.  

And yet it has taken two days for me to see clearly a trait that Lincoln, King, Day, and Merton had in common.   It is this: All four of them were great writers.  Holy in their different ways, geniuses of the common good, they were also exceptional in their use of the written word to tell the rest of us what they had seen and heard – and what needs to be done.

That Pope Francis is not known as a writer himself makes the choice of these four all the more notable.  

It’s a powerful reminder of how fully our encounter (to use a word Francis cherishes) with things of the spirit is bound up with our encounter with the written word.  

I know it called me back to my own calling.   The next morning I rose at dawn, went straight to the keyboard, and tried to “write the best words that I could write” (as Dylan put it) about Francis’s visit to Ground Zero.  

The essay, with photos and video from Vanity Fair staff, is here.   

Francis Spoke; the Bishops (Let’s Figure) Listened

     In the moments before Pope Francis arrived at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington to address the U.S. bishops, crowds massed at both ends of the block of Rhode Island Avenue where the cathedral is.   Then in a flash the Pope had arrived and was inside, and the crowds scattered: the people at one end had gotten a glimpse of him; the people at the other had not.

I am staying at the Tabard Inn, and I went back to the hotel, which is in the next street over – N Street, directly behind the cathedral.   As I sat eating a salad from Chop’t, it was strange to think that the Pope. right at the apogee of his renown. was in the next block, speaking to a congregation of a few hundred people – as many people as could fit onto the three luxury coaches reserved for the bishops and parked across the street from the inn.

On vanityfair.com, I spelled out the ways in which the visit to St. Matthew’s was symbolically the most consequential event of Pope Francis’s time in Washington, for it joined his Thousand Days – as I am calling them – to those of President Kennedy, whose funeral was held in the cathedral.

But it may be literally consequential as well.  Unlike, say the members of Congress, the members of the U.S. episocopate are bound to listen to Francis, and in key respects to obey him.  I figure they listened pretty closely.

Francis’s First Day: A Letdown

     Monday afternoon the press center looked like the Superdome just before the onset of Hurricane Katrina.  Tuesday morning it looked like the proverbial clown convention – several hundred members of the Homeland Security Administration in bright blue shirts, all signing in and gaining clearance to be bused to Joint Base Andrews for Pope Francis’s arrival in the United States – “on American soil,” as the more hyperbole-prone commentators put it.

I am covering the visit for Vanity Fair via its website, following on my profile of Pope Francis in the current (October) issue of the magazine.   My first piece, up as the Pope arrived, proposes that Francis’s personal authenticity is what makes his visit significant – because “he comes at a time when American public life is notably lacking in authenticity.” With an eye on the packed schedule and the tight security, the piece goes on:

How, in such a setting, could anybody let his authentic self show? If anybody can, it is Francis—but I think it’s fair to say that unless he can find a way to break through the cordons and act spontaneously, the visit will be a letdown.

By that standard, Francis’s arrival at Joint Base Andrews was a letdown.  The Pope arrived.  He said some things to the President and some other people that weren’t transmitted by any of the several thousand microphones present.  He rode in the back of  a black Fiat to the nunciature, got out, and went inside – without stopping to greet the schoolchildren assembled to welcome him, as far as I could tell.

The best thing was the Fiat: small, stylish, storied (“Fix It Again, Tony”), still anomalous in the United States, and – not least – a car unlike all the others in the motorcade, which made it an obvious target for a would-be assassin, and so showed Francis’s indifference to the massive security operation enacted on his behalf.

“Fix it again, Francis.”   My coverage continues today on vanityfair.com.

James vanOosting: Sleepless Nights

     In the middle of the night, in Washington for Pope Francis’s visit and unable to sleep, I thought of Berlioz – thought of my friend James vanOosting unable to sleep and listening to Berlioz.

Jim, for reasons he sets out in a gorgeous and heartbreaking essay in Commonweal, often finds himself awake in the middle of the night, unable to sleep:    

That’s when I tip-toe into the living room, lie down on the sofa, and listen to music. I’ve become a groupie of Hector Berlioz, wild for his Requiem. I’ve probably listened to the entire thing twenty times. It calls for an enormous chorus and orchestra, plus antiphonal brass choirs that play halfway back in Carnegie Hall, which means that Robert Spano, the conductor, must have eyes in the back of his head. Who’d believe that a Mass for the dead could be so majestic, so uplifting?

As the passage makes apparent, Jim is a writer (see his book And the Flesh Became Word). At Fordham, where he a master professor of communications, and where I came to know him, he is known to all as “JVO,” and the initials have always seemed to me correspond to his pointed white beard and thick, artfully combed head of white hair, like an old-school emoji for this man at once witty and wise.

Turns out he is wise like a child.   A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Oliver Sacks’s last essay and the way Sacks, near death, made a connection between death and the Sabbath that seemed altogether new – seemed altogether to me, anyhow.

Now JVO has spelled out the way the prospect of death in adulthood is a necessary end to childhood in a way that is utterly fresh and startling:

Dying is an adult activity.  This has been one of its bigger surprises for me, so far. I find I’m needing to leave behind the child side of myself in order to go where I now need to go, in order to do what I now need to do. This child-self has been a constant companion of my adult years. It’s helped me slog through the gobbledygook of career, mock the pomposity of achievement and, sometimes, levitate against the downward-sucking gravities of title and résumé.

Where I’m traveling to is not the kind of place a child should go. And my famous destination, about which so much has been written, is not marked clearly on the map, strangely. Instead, where X ought to mark the spot, there’s merely a note telling one to go over to the other side. Any child, spotting this trap, would turn tail and run. That would be the right thing to do, the reasonable thing to do, for a child.

That is wisdom, nothing less.  JVO, I am listening.   You know things we all need to know, and you know how to say them as well as anybody.

Pope Francis and Dorothy Day: Love in Action

     Not long after I spent a midday with him at the offices of La Civiltà Cattolica in Rome, Pope Francis’s confidant Antonio Spadaro made a return visit, speaking at the Sheen Center in on the lower East Side of Manhattan – a k a the East Village.   His remarks that day – about Pope Francis and social media – show up in my profile of Francis for Vanity Fair:

Spadaro, also a contributor to Wired in Italy, savors the paradox that this gadget-averse Pope has become a social-media phenomenon. “He doesn’t have a tablet. He doesn’t use a mobile—he refused to carry one when he was in Buenos Aires. But he instinctively grasps that if the Church is going to meet people where they are—and one of the places where people are in our time is in the digital space—then you have to go there.”

Today the Sheen Center hosts a different Pope Francis event.  With the Holy Father due to visit New York next week, somebody had the inspired idea of connecting the dots between Francis and Dorothy Day in a public conversation at the Sheen Center.   So that’s what we’ll do, beginning at 1 p.m. – and our remarks will bracket a screening of Don’t Call Me a Saint, Claudia Larson’s documentary about the Catholic Worker foundress.

The first thing to say about Dorothy Day and Pope Francis together is that they understand poverty.  “I condemn poverty, and I advocate it,” she said; he chose the name Francis to affirm that the Catholic Church is a church of the poor first of all and that to be Catholic is to understand our own poverty and make the most of it.

Carmen Trotta, long of St. Joseph’s House, which is nearby, will be there, as will Dorothy Day’s granddaughter Martha Hennessy.   Maryhouse – where Dorothy Day died in 1980 – is also nearby.   I still hold out the hope that Pope Francis will get there during his visit next week; there’s no better place in the city for him to witness what she (after Dostoevsky) liked to call “love in action.”  

Francis in Philly: It’s So Crowded, Nobody’s Going

     Fr. James Martin is generally so enthusiastic, so upbeat, so ready to see the bright side, that when he sees a problem, even a small problem, I take note even more than I usually do of his work.

And Fr. Martin, known as a Jesuit, is first of all a Philadelphian.

So when Fr. Martin returned from Philadelphia the other day with word that hotels in the city still have rooms for Pope Francis’s visit, and that people are so fearful of the vast crowds that, in the spirit of Yogi Berra – who said “The place is so crowded these days, nobody goes there” – they are staying home, I figured there must be something to it.

Is there?  We’ll know in ten days.  Or we won’t, because the people organizing the Congress of Families and the papal Mass on the Ben Franklin Parkway will catch Fr. Martin’s drift – surely they read his Facebook page, which is read by tens of thousands – and distribute some more tickets to boost the crowd.

But I think, on some level, there is something to it – something I tried to spell out in my profile of Francis for Vanity Fair.  It is this: Francis is not a man whose most authentic self is the self that is seen by huge crowds.

John Paul thrived on crowds.  Benedict was indifferent to them, even leery of them.   Francis (as we have seen) is perfectly capable in crowds – but he seems most himself when meeting people in twos and threes.   So it is that, in his pontificate, the weekly audiences and Angelus in Rome have become places for close encounters with him:

Francis comes to the window and waves, and we see him. Sure, we’re seeing the Pope, on high, an icon in extremest white. But in the mind’s eye we also see the ordinary pastor who embraced a man with boils in St. Peter’s Square; who put on a clown nose without worrying that it might diminish the dignity of the papal office. In spirit, Francis isn’t up there in the palace. He is down in the square with everybody else.

Surely some lucky people will have close encounters with Francis in Washington and New York and Philadelphia.  As for those who stay away, I suspect that this is one reason why: they don’t want the feeling of closeness to Francis – which is profound just now – to be amortized over a crowd.

The photograph shows Philadelphians gathered for a Mass celebrated by Pope John Paul II on the Ben Franklin Parkway in 1979.   Fr. Martin calls the event “one of my most vivid memories of adolescence.”

Pope Francis: The Mystery of Personality

     Flannery O'Connor said somewhere that the true subject of fiction is “the mystery of personality.”   It seems to me that “the mystery of personality” is the true subject of literary biography, too; and so, when, in the early stages of writing a group portrait of four American Catholic writers, I was asked to write about the papacy, I instinctively turned to the mystery of personality – considering the papal office by considering the character of the man who occupied it.  

Twelve years later, I still think it’s a sound approach, and it’s the approach I took in writing a profile of Pope Francis – “Our Man in the Vatican” – that’s out in the October Vanity Fair.  From the headline (chosen by the editors) onward, the profile focuses on the man now known simply as Francis, who makes his own bed and carries his own briefcase: 

Somehow he has stayed true to himself and to the core Catholic message and has kept free of the pomp of the papacy, the crush of celebrity, and the expectations of the global Church.  “He doesn’t `play’ the Pope,’ says Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, head of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications.  “He is who he is.”

He is who he is: and and through the mystery of personality, who he is is shaping – changing – the Church.

Sounds obvious, but it’s not.  For half a century – as I spelled out in The Atlantic in 2004 – coverage of the papacy has focused on the sociology of the Vatican; the exoticism of the place, a foreign country after all; its monarchical trappings (those Swiss Guards); the long-running conflicts between Italians and internationalists, conservatives and progressives, Augustinians and Thomists, and so on; or the perpetual gap between the medium and the message –the everyday contradictions and hypocrisy of the place.  

To focus on the Vatican in one of these ways is to be an expert, or to sound like one.  But it is to miss much of the human story.  As I see it, the papacy in our time is better understood through attention to the character of popes in our time.  John Paul was essentially a performer, like a Shakespearean actor on a global stage.  Benedict was essentially a scholar, drawn to texts and their interpretation. And Francis is essentially a conversationalist – meeting people face to face, talking and listening.

That’s the Francis I set out to depict in the Vanity Fair profile, which I see as a piece of long-form, present-tense portraiture in line with dozens of long-form portraits the magazine has published over the decades, often accompanied by portrait photographs that are works of art in their own right.  

“Our Man in the Vatican” begins on page 268 and is up on vf.com.  

Oscar Romero and His Brothers

No,that’s not a photograph from the Fjallraven ads in Outside magazine – photographs of hirsute guys wearing new-old-school outdoor gear with a rumpled flair.

It’s a photograph of two martyrs – actual, official martyrs, recognized as such by the church in Rome.

In yesterday’s announcement of fresh beatifications by the Congregation of Causes – the Vatican’s “saint-making” office – the recognition of Oscar Romero got all the attention.  The attention is itself a good thing.  Truly, there’s no more unimpeachable martyr than Archbishop Romero, shot dead by (U.S.-backed) anti-government insurgents as he celebrated Mass in the cathedral in San Salvador in 1980.  Truly, his beatification comes a generation later than is right.   Truly, he should have been canonized before John Paul II, the man ultimately responsible for the go-slow of his process.  

But it was the dates alongside the other men named with Archbishop Romero in the announcement that caught my eye:

Servants of God Michal Tomaszek (Poland, 1960) and Zbigniew Strazalkowski (Poland, 1958), professed priests of the Order of Friars Minor Conventual, and Alessandro Dordi, Italian diocesan priest, killed in hatred of the faith in Peru on 9 and 25 August 1991.

The dates were so recent, when compared to the usual dates in such announcements, that at first I thought they were the dates of the men’s deaths. But they are the years those men were born. The guys in the photographs were, and are, martyrs of my own generation – a new thing, in my experience, and one that sparked a shock of recognition.

Tomaszek and Strzałkowski, Conventual Franciscan friars ordained in Cracow, had set out from Poland to work in a mission in the Peruvian highlands – preaching, teaching, building, and so on.  Not long after this photograph was taken they were murdered by members of the Shining Path, the violent guerrilla warriors then prominent in Peru. 

On August 9, after Mass, Miguel Tomaszek and Zbigniew Strzałkowski were taken from the Pariacoto friary and led to the town hall. There the terrorists put them in the friars’ own jeep, together with Sister Bertha Hernández from the religious community of the Handmaids of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, who of her own volition went with them. Before they crossed the bridge to Cochabamba i Huarez, the terrorists pushed Sister Bertha out of the vehicle and drove the friars to a place called Old Town (Pueblo Viejo), near the cemetery. There they executed Fr. Miguel by a gunshot in the neck and Fr. Zbigniew with two shots, one in the back and the other in the head. They also killed the mayor, Justino Masa …
Shining Path terrorists killed the missionaries because … “They preach peace and tranquilize the people with religion… We must kill those who preach peace. Religion is the opium of the people, a way of keeping them under control.”

A little more than two weeks later the guerrillas killed Alessandro Dordi, a priest from Italy.

I admit, I don’t have more to say just now about these men or what happened to them.  A quarter of a century later, I am just beginning to come to know their stories.  For now, knowing that they lived and died is enough – is a beginning.