The canonization of Marianne Cope, along with Kateri
Tekakwitha, on October 21, occasioned the publication of a stunning
photograph showing Marianne standing beside the funeral bier of St.
Damien in Kalaupapa, Molokai. That was in 1889, and the picture is so
sharp that it could have been taken today. It must be the first
photograph of two saints together. The holy friendships of Teresa of
Avila with John of the Cross, and Francis de Sales with Jane de Chantal
illuminated civilization before photography.
St. Damien’s body is scarred with leprosy but vested in the fine
chasuble in which he used to offer Mass. St. Marianne, in her timeless
religious habit, shows no sorrow for she obviously knows she is looking
at a saint, not knowing that she is one herself.
Studying that photograph, one thinks of how hard they worked, not
only among the outcast lepers, but all their lives. Damien, born Jozef
de Veuster in Belgium, was a farm boy, and Marianne left school in
Utica, New York, after the eighth grade to support her family by working
in factories.
Not in the picture was their helper, Joseph Dutton, a Civil War
veteran who was so traumatized by the ravages of war and his broken
marriage that he became an alcoholic. He reformed his life, went to
Molokai and worked with the lepers for 45 years — cleaning latrines,
scrubbing floors, and binding sores — until his death in 1931. Their
great happiness would have been clouded to see how much unhappiness
there is in our land today.
As a typical eighteenth-century rationalist, Edward Gibbon was
cynical about Christianity, but as an historian he analyzed the decline
of once-great civilizations in terms of natural virtue: “In the end,
more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life,
and they lost it all — security, comfort, and freedom. When the
Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give
to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from
responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.”
I expect that Gibbon would have understood modern saints no better
than he did the early martyrs and confessors, but he would have seen in
them a selfless energy that builds noble societies, and the neglect of
such energy pulls them down. Our own nation is facing these realities as
it decides what it wants to be. The present crisis in culture cannot be
resolved if it is addressed only in terms of economics and
international relations. The real leaders are not those who hypnotize
naïve people into thinking that they are the source of hope. Those who
can rescue nations from servility to selfishness are not on slick
campaign posters, but in stark black and white photographs like that
taken on Molokai in 1889.
1 comment:
This is edifying, thank you.
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