I feel like this is a special issue of Communio because it includes the breadth of content I always envisioned it should have. There is Mary Englert’s sensitive article about Martha, a homeless person who died recently after spending her last years living around Malachi’s, Greg Chmura’s reflection on Psalm 19, an excerpt from Nelson Mandela’s inauguration speech, Marita Pompeani’s update on the activities of the Parent Enrichment class, John Lucic’s regular report on Council, and Chris Schenk’s convincing article on "Jesus and Women in Catholicism," which addresses the issue of papal infallibility and the non-ordination of women. My deepest thanks to all who took the time to write for Communio.

Condolences to the family of Community member Marty Yurick, who passed away recently, and to Paul Kunkel and his family on the death of Paul’s aunt, Maria Kunkel, who lived in Germany. Meanwhile, Paul tells me that his father is doing much better and he thanks everyone for their prayers.

Two issues ago, I wrote something about how something needs to be done about how we are just too rushed, busy and short of time for our own good. At about the same time, U.S. News & World Report ran an article on the same subject (Dec. 11 issue), highlighting what some people are doing about it. However, most of the solutions described there required some measure of affluence to effect. What about those who are not so free to choose a simpler, slower-paced lifestyle? I still think the answer will ultimately be a political one. Some possibilities to look at might be: mandated vacation time, a higher minimum wage, lower speed limits, maybe even a return to the Blue Laws of long ago. Perhaps we need to reexamine the concept of "sabbath."

"Martha" wasn’t even her real name. It was "Maria." And very little else, fact or fiction, was known about her. Yet, Martha was a presence to us here at St. Malachi for many, many years.

Her small, forlorn figure could be seen here and there within a short radius of the church -- in the streets and alleyways, under the bridges, at the rectory back door, or hovering in the parking area waiting for the end of a meeting so she could come into the hall to sleep on the floor.

Winter and summer in the same dark, increasingly ragged ankle-length clothes, her head buried in a cap or shawl. Clothing much too warm for summer, yet not quite warm enough for winter. (One time, Fr. Paul Hritz prevailed on her to accept another coat; she returned it the next day, telling him to "give it to the poor." He observed that she was "street-smart. She wasn’t going to get mugged for that coat.")

Martha at all times kept all her worldly goods at her side, in plastic shopping bags. For awhile there, a shabby small dog was ever at her side too.

Martha apparently came to the U.S. from Eastern Europe via the WWII refugee camp route. She was a "DP" -- a displaced person. She was angry. She kept people at a distance. She refused assistance. Or accepted it begrudgingly, and only on her own terms.

So what did this get her? A place in a lot of hearts, that’s what.

Martha’s funeral Liturgy a few weeks ago was crowded with St. Malachi community and parish members; she was especially important to Malachi staff, Monday Nite Meal and Back Door Ministry people. At their own request, Stella Maris men were her pallbearers. (To them, she was known as "Maria." When coaxed, she drank their coffee. They watched out for her; she was "family" to them, too.)

This "bag lady," or "street person," if you will, was loved. Tears were shed at her funeral, and stories were told. Turning away from her open casket in the back of the church, before the Liturgy, one viewer said, "Why, she looks like a baroness." In a black lace dress, she did.

Affectionate chuckles greeted Fr. Tony Schuerger’s observation at the start of his homily: "This is one thing Martha could not stop us from doing!"

From several eulogists came recollections that belied the general Martha-image. For instance, she had been seen one time dancing around the hall’s stage area, Dancing and singing. And actually smiling. (Martha? Smiling?)

Toward the end, when her poor abscessed feet could hardly carry her, she finally allowed someone to bandage them. But, consistent with her image, she would not accept needed assistance up to the rectory food window unless all her bags were brought along as well.

Through the years my own attempts at communicating with Martha were unsuccessful. Occasionally my greeting was met with a nod, a grunt and, just once, a wave of the hand. Fortunately, others were better at it than I. Last winter I was very moved at the sight of Mary Laubenthal holding Martha in her arms, gently rocking her and crooning: "Martha dear, please let me get you a warmer coat." The look on Martha’s usually expressionless face was one of complete bliss. (But she didn’t give in on the coat.)

Like those of most "homeless," Martha’s life was one of dreadful mental and physical disturbance. Yet, she was not totally homeless. She chose St. Malachi’s as her home. On her own terms, of course, always resisting offers of real housing arrangements.

Truth to tell, I think she was sent. A gift to us. A constant reminder that no matter how bloody awful things get, they could be worse. A constant reminder to be grateful.

No telling how many people driving to or from the Flats or downtown were affected by the heart-wrenching sight of that lonely, grungy little street person. There’s an old saying: "There, but for the grace of God, go I." Maybe there should be a similar one for Martha: "Here, thanks to the grace of God, came she."

Well, she’s certainly not homeless now. Her clothes are no longer in shreds, and her streets this terrible winter are a lot warmer than ours. Let’s thank God for that, and for the gift of Martha herself. As they used to say around here: "God be good to her!"

During the next four weeks of Ordinary Time, the gospel readings take us through chapter 5 of Matthew. Therein, Jesus preaches about the Law, both the Old and the New. In conjunction with this, we will be singing during these weeks the seasonal responsorial psalm, "Lord, you have the words of everlasting life," Psalm 19 (Gather #26).

There are some lines in this psalm that may strike you, like they have me, as rather odd. The psalmist sings that the Law "refreshes the soul", "rejoices the heart," and is "sweeter than honey." How, we might ask, can the Law (the 10 Commandments along with other statutes of the Old Testament) arouse such gleefulness? Certainly we may respect the Law or agree with it as being a good set of precepts, but how can something that at times can be so hard to obey also be something that someone would want to rapturously embrace?

Let me share with you an answer I found in C.S. Lewis’ Reflections on the Psalms. His explanation is that to the Hebrews the Law was more than just a complex system of restrictions on behavior; it was an ordering of a person’s daily life that was a reflection of the Divine Order. The psalmist, then, found in the Law, "...the ‘real’ or ‘correct’ or stable, well-grounded, directions for living," and this is what he or she was so excited about. Knowing, really knowing exactly how to live each moment of our life, and knowing that we are in perfect synchronicity with the Divine Will, that is a joy; and "sweeter than honey" is hardly a melodramatic description.

The Parent Enrichment discussion group has been meeting faithfully during Christian Formation classes in the school library. This group was established by the Christian Formation committee to serve parent’s needs for support and information in raising our children in the Catholic faith.

The focus the group choose in the first part of the school year was on the topic of violence in the media. We were aided by a video program entitled "Beyond Blame: Challenging Violence in the Media" on loan to us from the Diocesan Media Center. This program effectively highlighted many of the influences that have played into the heavy reliance on violence in children and adult television programming, namely, money and the ease in which violent programming can be marketed internationally -- it does not require much translation when people are being slaughtered.

We also discovered that the television has become the family storyteller and removes much creativity and interaction within the family. Other highlights from this program included the effects of violence on people and the myths associated with media violence. Although not all of this information was new, these concepts have helped us to look realistically at the use of television in our homes and given us ideas and support to more actively monitor its use.

Additionally, we have looked at what we can offer our children in place of the electronic storyteller in our living rooms. In Advent, for example, we focused on some of the ways we can put Christ back into our holiday celebrations. Kim Langley gave an excellent presentation to our group on this topic. We followed this up with a session led by John Lucic and Bill Johansen telling the stories of our holiday traditions. A big thank you to Kim, John and Bill for helping to enlighten our group!

As we start the new year, we are shifting our focus and utilizing the series of books, "The Catechism of the Catholic Church: Familystyle," by David Thomas and Mary Joyce Calnan. Using an informal format of reading, discussion and video presentations, we are exploring how we can help pass on our faith to our children. We are always interested in learning about new resources to aid in our discussion and welcome anyone interested in joining us. If you would like more information about Parent Enrichment or the topics we have already covered, please call me at 779-5772.

In the interest of dialogue, I would like to offer some nuance to a recent editorial found in the Universe Bulletin regarding a letter from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith offering the opinion that the ban on women’s ordination constituted "infallible" teaching. The editorial further opined that like the doctrine on Eucharist, this teaching was another of which we need not make sense.

In light of this distressing dearth of leadership of my own about how women and men of faith may wish to deal with the present status of for how to deal with the present teaching in a pastoral manner, I wish to offer several pastoral perspectives women-in-decision making and in ministry in the family of Catholicism.

Two articles in the Dec. 9 issue of America, one by prominent canon lawyer Ladisaus Orsy, and the other by ecclesiologist Francis Sullivan, explain why it is that the ban on women’s ordination does not meet any criteria heretofore understood by the universal church as constituting infallibility. Both are careful to acknowledge the papal teaching that the ban constitutes "definitive" doctrine, and certainly faithful Catholics are bound to obey present discipline. I know of no one presently ordaining Catholic women (except of course, the various Protestant denominations who are ordaining all too many formerly Catholic women who have felt compelled to follow their call to ministry in other Christian communions). Everyone else I know is obeying the pope.

But it is not my purpose here to debate the levels of authority of the teaching. Instead, I want to address the great pastoral difficulty in which women and men of faith find themselves when faced with such a troublesome church position. Perhaps this difficulty is best expressed by the Leadership Conference of Women Religious in its Nov. 28 press release. This document notes, on the one hand, recent papal and episcopal statements that women are equal in Catholicism and that sexism is to be renounced. On the other hand, they say: "It is the experience of women who have served long and faithfully in this church that ultimate authority lies with ordination." And of course, only men can be ordained. So we find ourselves in a paradoxical moment in our Catholic family. Women are equal but they can’t exercise that equality ministerially or jurisdictionally. Men are the sole guardians of "equality," yet in my experience, the pastoral anguish among many of my priest-brothers has been even greater than that of Catholic women. How do women and men ministers deal with the pastoral fall-out of such an odd situation?

I think in several ways. For me, first and foremost has been to continue to trust the God who is able to write straight with the crooked lines both of our lives and of our church: "For all things work together unto good for those that love God."

This being said, sexism and non-inclusion must be named and resisted in our Catholic family. An important first step, I believe is to make visible the heretofore invisible women-of -faith in our Judao-Christian heritage. What would it be like if Sarah was always named with Abraham, Rebecca with Isaac, Rachel with Jacob? Are they not our ancestors-in-faith as well? Women can have great difficulty connecting with a history in which only males are mentioned, even though that history also contains a long and illustrious line of women leaders (Deborah, Esther, Miriam, Ruth).

Another way of making the liberating Jesus available to today’s women is to look at his practice toward the women in his own day. The Scriptures abound with Jesus’ non-discriminatory behavior, whether it be refusal to hold women alone responsible for sexual transgression as in the woman taken in adultery; the inclusion of women (Magdalen, Joanna, Susanna) among the itinerant Galilean discipleship; or the many women leaders of the early Christian communities (Phoebe, Lydia, Junia, Prisca) named in Paul’s letter to the Romans. Women and men ministers must become educated and preach about the many ways that Jesus himself liberated both women and men from the cultural sexism of his time, and how it is that Jesus may be inviting us to resist such discrimination today.

I have given numerous presentations over the past several years on "Jesus and Women," and have never yet failed to notice the hush that falls over the room as women see with new eyes and hear with new ears, a Jesus who valued them so much that he refused to follow cultural norms that shamed, excluded, or isolated them. In fact, some would say that it was this very experience of Jesus’ equal calling and commissioning of them for discipleship (Martha, the Samaritan women, Mary Magdalen) that led first century Christian women to claim equal responsibility for leadership with their male brothers (Romans:16).

Likewise today. It is the experience of Jesus calling them to ministry that compels women to respond, whether it be in programs such as our own diocesan certification process for pastoral ministers, or in the seemingly wider freedoms of the Protestant communion. Women must respond, for it is Jesus who calls, and we cannot turn away.

Finally, it is from this personal experience of the liberating, healing Jesus, and from faithfulness to Him, that many of us find we must continue to question present jurisdictional discipline (even as we obey it) while awaiting the wider vision of God’s own Spirit. Perhaps that Spirit will show us (as advocated by several U.S. canon lawyers) that jurisdiction need not be linked to ordination, thereby opening ways not only for women’s voices to be heard in governance, but also those of the laity.

Somehow a way will open. For the present, women of faith find themselves unable to be unfaithful to the Jesus of Scriptures and of their own experience, by assenting unquestioningly to a teaching which says that this same Jesus inexplicably and deliberately chose to exclude them. Our study and our experience tell us differently, and to deny it is to deny Jesus once again. Like Magdalen, Joanna, and Mary before us, we must stand by Jesus in good times and in hard times. Paradoxically (or is it God’s wonderfully inclusive ways?) this inability to run away from a Gospel mandate may well lead to a greater voice for all of God’s people in the governance of a Church which is, after all all of us.

But what to do while living in the meantime? I like Leadership Conference of Women Religious’s approach. We pray, we fast, we counsel, we witness, we preach, we (to take a line from Leonard Bernstein’s Mass): "We wait... we wait for the Word... of the Lord."

I’ve gradually been exploring various on-line locations that relate to what we are about here at Malachi’s and I’d be very interested to hear from others on what they’ve found.

Here are two World Wide Web sites of interest: The Vatican now has one at www.vatican.va, which, when I checked it, chiefly consisted of Christmas greetings from the Pope. From another perspective, deposed French Bishop Jacques Gaillot has his own Web site at www.partenia.fr/, but this one is only in French. The Pope fired Bishop Gaillot from his diocese last year because of his liberal views.

More accessible is Catholic Online, available through CompuServe (GO CATHOLIC) and as a World Wide Web site (www.catholic.org). There are multiple discussion groups and some very interesting libraries of documents and graphics files. I downloaded quite a bit of clip art that people in the Community might find useful -- contact me if you are interested. The Web site of Catholic Online includes "links" or easy cross-references to related resources and Web pages.

The political climate of Catholic Online is fairly conservative. In the membership information, they write, "Our members include people and organizations who are traditional, contemporary and conservative." It says something that they can draw a distinction between traditional and conservative, and do not mention liberal or progressive. In glancing through the various postings related to women’s ordination -- located in the "Women’s Issues" section; I for one don’t think this is just a women’s issue -- the stronger voices were opposed to ordaining women. But there is much else of value there. If you have the means, check it out.

There also is a Catholic Community section in America Online (keyword: CATHOLIC) and, while it does not seem to have the same depth of information as Catholic Online, it does reflect a wider cross-section of viewpoints. America Online also has a fairly active area devoted to other Christian groups, notably Conservative Evangelicals. While you may not agree with some things they say, you may find some worthwhile reading there. I’ve always found the periodical Christianity Today interesting.

The Council of the Community of St. Malachi met Sunday, Jan. 21. New at-large Council member Stephanie Taylor-Ayers was commissioned to replace Bob Simoneau who recently moved to Pittsburgh.

PASTOR’S REPORT: Ambassadors for Christ daily reflection booklets for Lent by Mary Jane Treichel have arrived.

PRESIDENT’S REPORT: The Diocesan Pastoral Council asked for nominations to that group. Contact Paul Kunkel (232-7622) if you are interested.

FUTURECHURCH: In response to Bishop Pilla seeking dialogue about the recent statement by the Vatican on women’s ordination, Council plans to sign a letter drafted by Chris Schenk expressing "our inability to freely assent to the recent opinion to the recent opinion issued by Cardinal Ratzinger (of the Vatican) on the ‘infallibility’ of the Church teaching on the non-ordination of women." One reason Council plans to send this message to Bishop Pilla is that 43% of the world’s Catholic parishes have no priest at all due to the priest shortage.

FINANCE: Council approved budget increases to three committees: Communications $100; Membership $300; and Community Council $300.

SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT: The speaker for the next Second Wednesday Night Speaker Series, on Feb. 14, will be Kim Langley. Her topic: "Lent: A Family Celebration."

CHRISTIAN FORMATION: $300 was collected for the Christmas project, Adopt-A-Family. On Sunday, Feb. 18, from noon to 2:00 p.m., families are invited to bring their favorite games for some shared fun at Malachi Center. Pizza and pop will be provided. See the newsletter’s Calendar for details about First Reconciliation, First Communion and junior/senior high retreats.

SOCIAL CONCERNS: Poor attendance at meetings of this committee have prompted discussions about options open to the committee: 1) continue and hope for more participation (although this has been tried for three years with little success, 2) publish articles in Communio to promote action on current affairs, 3) have a few people on the committee take positions on current affairs and contact representatives on behalf of the Community, 4) disband the committee, or 5) recruit a new committee chair who may bring fresher ideas. Next meeting is Feb. 28, 7:30 p.m., at Lois Dingman’s, 22234 River Walk Rd., Rocky River. Subject: "Impending changes to Medicare and Medicaid and their effects on the poor and elderly."

MEMBERSHIP: See the Calendar of Opportunities for details on the next Welcome Series. Membership is considering putting together a Community Information booklet for prospective members. Contact Rose Horning if you would like to help with this project.

CHARTER REVIEW: Council is reviewing the Community Charter revisions proposed by an ad hoc committee. They will be presented to the Community for review in the near future. The three big changes proposed are: 1) move the start of the fiscal year from September to July; 2) hold the membership/commitment drive a month earlier; and 3) reduce the size of Council.

MALACHI CENTER: Thanks to Tony DiNardo and Joe Molnar for redecorating the Center’s kitchen. Watch for a raffle to raise funds to refurbish the Center. The Center received a $5000 United Black Fund Grant for alternative teen programming.

OTHER: Lori Ashyk (at-large Council member) may soon be working on a social concerns library. Anyone who has a bookcase to donate, call Lori at 676-5938. Kathy Cooney (at-large Council member) will be coordinating members of Council to make phone contact with Community members to encourage participation in committees and ministries.

THE COMMUNITY OF ST. MALACHI is a lay-directed, non-territorial personal parish of the Diocese of Cleveland. Although separate from the Parish of St. Malachi, we join together for many worthwhile activities. All are welcome to worship at the 11:00 a.m. Community liturgy on Sunday. Community members are expected to actively contribute of their time, talent and treasure.