The following is the eulogy given by SNAP board member Peter Isely at the funeral of his mother, Magdalene, who recently passed away. The Our Father, the prayer my mother, Magdalene, prayed every day of her life begins with the phrase, 'Our Father, who is in heaven.'
God, Christ instructs us, is absent from the earth.
He is nowhere to be found here.
So, the prayer implies, it is truly pointless to look for him.
When Jesus appeared to Mary and Mary Magdalene at the tomb they mistook him for the gardener.
He said to them: 'The one you are seeking for is not here.'I asked Magdalene's beloved husband of 30 years, Charles, if he had some instructions for this eulogy.
First, he told me not to talk about him, so I won't. Second, he asked me to speak directly about what my mother endured at learning that two of her sons had been sexually assaulted by priests when they were children.
I have spoken on this topic many times over the years but never from the pulpit of a Roman Catholic Church.My brother before me spoke of my mother's great devotion to her children.
I will speak of her other great love, her love for her church.
Through the sexual molestation of two of her children by priests and the cover up of these crimes by church leaders, Magdalene touched and lived directly the mysterious absence of God that Christ spoke of in the prayer he gave to us.
My mother was the daughter of immigrant Croatian parents who came to this country in 1914, part of the great flood of poverty and hope that flowed through Ellis Island in the first part of the last century.
You do not settle in the beautiful and forbidden woods of Northern Wisconsin and Michigan without learning to be very tough. They passed on that toughness to my mother and their other seven children.
Her father labored in the iron ore and copper mines his entire adult life; his lungs paid the price and brought about his premature death.
Her mother, who lived to be 93, barely spoke a word of English. But they knew their Catholic catechism, their rosaries and their novenas. And they knew the Our Father, the great prayer to God's absence.
My mother valued toughness, although she was extraordinarily tender hearted.
She had the toughness that Christ taught, the kind of toughness most of us like to forget, like when Jesus instructed us that he came to bring the sword and not peace, division not harmony; or when he insisted that in order to be his disciple we would have to hate our father and mother, our wife or husband, and our children; or when he said that the poor will always be with us, or pay Caesar his due, or let the dead bury the dead. Weep for yourself, he said, not for me.
One of the tough words of Jesus that my mom and I talked about before she died was the utterly bracing and completely forgotten wisdom of God's equanimity when he observed that 'the rain falls upon both the just and the unjust alike.'
That single line contradicts almost the entirety of what is being preached in most Christian churches.
It makes perfectly clear that there is no necessary relationship between virtue and reward. The rain will come in sheets down upon you, regardless of how good you are; no special favors will be extended to you for loving God; no pride of place will be granted for your purity of heart.
Our only promise is the promise of the Cross. And who would want that?
My mother knew that Christ's church needed apostles, which is why she was so enamored of the priesthood. I would jokingly tell her that she was a 'priestophile.'
She was part of that utterly unique and fast disappearing class of devoted Catholic mothers who labored tirelessly to get a Roman collar around one of their sons.
It is sometimes said that women have no real power in the Catholic Church because they cannot be ordained priests; maybe so.
But surely behind all the popes and cardinals and bishops of the church stand the real power running the church: their mothers!
Six of Magdalene's eight children were boys. Three attended the seminary. Her first husband, John, was a student at St. Frances De Sales in Milwaukee.
His senior high school year he ditched classes, misled to the draft board about his age, and joined the submarine fleet in the Pacific War.
Her second husband, Charles, who Magdalene very fittingly met at a conference on the Blessed Virgin Mary, nearly became a Carthusian monk, if not for the Latin.
Instead, he trained fighter pilots for Korea and later became the first police officer to retire from the Greenfield, Wisconsin police force. Never one to give up, my mom was working on the next generation of male grandchildren, including my own son.
All these hopes for the priesthood, yet no priests!
Instead, Magdalene raised eight children on her own after the tragic death of her first husband in an automobile crash. I and my twin brother were only nine months of age.
The oldest was John, who was thirteen. I read recently that only 28 percent of adult Americans have college degrees. All eight of Magdalene's children, with no financial assistance from a working husband, graduated from college, several with graduate degrees; two are doctorates.
My mother was a super-Catholic. She prayed five rosaries, typically, a day.
A rosary, to her and Charles, is all three traditional mysteries, so that's fifteen decades. In other words, she would pray 75 decades of the rosary every day!
If you strung the rosaries she prayed since childhood together end to end I am quite sure they would form a chain that would circle the moon and back again.
More importantly, she and Charles attended daily Mass, driving several miles in the early morning to do so.
Together, in his retirement, they happily traveled the country in what we kids called the 'God Mobile,' making all manner of pilgrimages to shrines and churches across the United States.
A favorite destination was Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico.
Hers was a maddening, passionate, and at times combustible Catholicism: high-octane, triple-strength, double-plied.
Don't misunderstand me. Magdalene could be a very frail person, very breakable.
There were limits to what she could endure. But her faith never lost its child like quality, the quality, Christ insisted, we must retain if we are to enter his Kingdom.
Children do not hold back their love. And she did not hold back her love for God.
That, undoubtedly, is why she was a life long and dedicated opponent of abortion. Not for ideological or even theological reasons. Her heart ached for these unfinished, undone and unfulfilled lives.
She had two miscarriages. Daily, she would pray for these two lost lives, which were as real and present to her as I or my seven other siblings.When Magdalene was a little girl, Christ came to her, in secret, as he does to all of us, and planted a seed, the seed of divine and supernatural love.
However God created this universe, it was built for this one thing alone: for our free consent to love Him. Real love can not be seduced, forced, or coerced in any way. It has to be freely and spontaneously and unabashedly given without expectation of hope for return.
This is why St. Paul tells us that we must be more concerned for God and others than for our own salvation.
Once we give our love to God, it cannot be given back. It can only be betrayed.
That is why the betrayal of Magdalene's love by Church leaders was so incomprehensible and inconsolable to her.
How could the Church, which exists only by the love freely returned to God, betray the very center of its teaching, the teaching that we were made only to give our free consent to God and for that purpose alone?
Nothing so directly targets and attacks the human faculty of consent as rape, especially the rape of a child. Children cannot say no, they cannot hold back, they cannot withhold consent.
The leaders of the church had no compunction taking for decades my mother's devotion, money, and even her sons. A widow's treasure. They lied to her, they deceived her, and they manipulated her.
Until her death last week, no bishop or provincial or priest sex offender directly responsible for the sexual assault of her children every apologized to her.
My mother longed for justice for her children and the army of abused children in the church. She knew well the classmate of mine who, a few years ago, shot and killed himself on Christmas Eve.
He was raped by the same priest that raped me and could no longer bear its memory.
Such things cry out to the heavens for justice. Justice: one of the secret names here on earth for God. When Christ planted the seed of love in Magdalene so long ago, she accepted His offer of love, and it grew into a mighty tree which sheltered, as best it could, her children, both born and unborn.
Gone for many decades from the North woods, my brother Dennis told me yesterday, are the giant fur trees which so towered over these woods that virtually no sunlight could reach the ground.
That is why deer, which are so plentiful today, to the point of nuisance and ecological danger, are not native to these woods, for there was no feeding ground in the shadows of these massive cathedrals, these sequoias of the North.
They were all cut down. Every last one. We shall never see their likes again. Why did we not have the sense to save at least one of these great trees from destruction, so that we could stand beneath its mighty branches, this lone survivor, and mourn and marvel at what we had so thoughtlessly destroyed?
I am mournful today not just for the personal loss of my mom. I am full of grief because mighty Catholic giants like her are fast disappearing from the American Catholic Church. I fear that we shall never see their likes again.
How could the child Magdalene ever have known that the mighty tree that had grown in her would be cut down and made into a cross that priests and archbishops and cardinals and provincials would thrust upon her and so many of the mothers of the Church?
How often I have overheard the great men of the cloth mock and laugh at devotion like my mother's, calling it rigid, old fashioned, annoying, archaic, medieval. Who can blame them?
There is, indeed, something absurd in such an all consuming love. It's not practical. It's not decorous. It's not measured.Let us cut down such a tree, they surmised. Are the Magdalene's of the church not plentiful?
And let us use the kindling to warm ourselves, build our careers, and sell what's left over for scrap. Of what importance are these silly widows who find two cents sweeping their homes, virtually all the money they have in the world, and give it to us?
What do these childish widows think we can accomplish and build with two worthless coins?
The absence of God from the earth does not mean that God has forever abandoned us.
If you look with love into His creation you will see Him, even in your affliction. You will touch the wounds of his hands and feet.
For God surrendered eternity, and became one of us, to join us in wonderment and sorrow at the Father's absence.
A final request from Charles; Magdalene, he told me, was not a saint, so do not canonize her.
We are Catholic and as Catholics we know that Magdalene still needs us and we still need her.
So, remember Magdalene in your prayers and in your masses.
We can still help her on her journey to God as she will surely continue to help us.
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Sotto Voce