The Mystery of Divine Providence

 One of the good news is that Pornchai has finally returned to his native home of Thailand.  You can read about it here.  Another article was sent to me by Father Gordon, which I find interesting.  Sometimes we wonder why bad things happen.  Why do injustices take place?  Why are the innocent punished while the guilty allowed to go free.  In the Neocatechumenal Way, we often say that God has a plan.  This plan always include our salvation and the salvation of others.  We don't always see what God is doing until later in time.  You can find the following article here.  

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It's Lent.  It's Late.  It's Time to Find Our Way Home

Cardinal Timothy Dolan presides over Palm Sunday Mass in an empty Saint Patrick's Cathedral

Like no other time in history, forces in our culture are driving us toward a rapid retreat from God and the tenets of faith.  Lent is our time to decide who we are.

Writing the "Blessed Among Us" column for the February 2021 issue of This Day Prayer for Today's Catholic, Robert Ellsworth penned the story of Maryknoll priest, Servant of God Francis X. Ford.  I was looking for the Mass readings for the First Sunday of Lent when I came upon Father Ford's story.  One sentence caught my eye:  He died in prison on February 21, 1952.

That was one year before I was born.  Francis Ford was one of the first Americans to join the newly founded Maryknoll missionary society just out of high school in Brooklyn, New York in 1912.  After priesthood ordination in 1920, he joined the first group of four Maryknoll priests on a missionary journey to China.  It was there that he died, 32 years later, in a Chinese prison.  

Father Ford spend many years in Kaying, in southern China.  During that time he witnessed the Chinese Catholic population there rise to over 20,000.  He chose to remain there during World War II, but after the war, during China's Communist Revolution, he was imprisoned for suspected espionage.  He was never tried, but during his imprisonment he was starved, beaten, and paraded before mocking crowds anxious to please the Communist regime.  

During that time, the Chinese Communist government confiscated farm lands and equipment of the Church and at all American-supported mssions, including Fu Jen University at Peking. 

Priests in the areas most affected by Marxism were working under extensive restrictions.  Some restrictions were self-imposed by the priests to avert Communist persecution of their people.  

Wholesale arrests took place beginning in December 1950 when the American bishop of Wuchow and 21 Maryknoll missionaries were imprisioned.  The usual charge was suspicion of espionage.  Througout this persecution, Father Ford never wavered from his faith.  He wrote from prison:

"Grant us, Lord to be the doorstep by which the multitudes may come to Thee, and if... we are ground underfoot and spat upon and worn out, at least we shall become the King's Highway to pathless China"  - Servant of God Francis X. Ford, 1952.

My first reaction to the story of Father Ford was to wonder what he may today think of the secret concordat signed by Pope Francis, and recently renewed, surrendering to the Chinese Communist government the authority to appoint Catholic bishops in effective abandonment of the Underground Church to which Father Ford gave his life.  

But more on that in a futre post.  This one is about Lent and not politics.  Well... at the moment I actually have a hard time separating the two.  Lent really is about politics, but only in the sense that conversion of the heart means putting - and keeping - our politics in their proper place.  Politics are a means to an end - the end hopefully being a fair and just society functioning in defense of unalienable human rights.  

But Lent is also about the End itself; our end.  It asks some fundamental questions of us.  Who are we?  Where does our treasure lie?  Where are we going spiritually?  Are any of our recent struggles - to which we have given so much of ourselves and our attention "paving the King's Highway" through a pathless humanity?  Are the affairs that embroil us and others to Christ? 

Since this post began with the story of an American priest who, though innocent died in a Chinese prison, I am faced with the possibility that I, too, though innocent, may die in an American one.  As the clock ticks into another Lent - my 27th in prison that feels more probable than possible.  I am not sure what I am supposed to do with that probability.  It is easy for us, as a society, to point to human rights abuses in China while the plank in our own eye blinds us to ourselves.  

Stumbling into the story of Father Francis X. Ford was a gift to me.  Just as in his Chinese prison, I, too, was beaten, starved, and paraded before humiliating mobs.  None of that happened lately.  It was all along ago, but like Father Ford, it left me at a crossroads.  I had to come, as he did, to accept my Cross as "pavement on the King's Highway" for another.  Like all of us, I ultimately came to this world from dust, and to dust I shall ultimately return.  In the time and space in between, I have been assigned a task.  As Saint John Henry Newman prayed, "I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next."

I confess that I was bitter for a time.  I wanted revenge more than I wanted justice.  I consumed it, and then it consumed me until the great mystery of Divine Providence placed my friend, Pornchai Moontri in my path.  He never did or said anything to make me think this, but he was like an immovable roadblock that would not let me pass.  His life events of abandonment being used, and then discarded into years of solitary confinement left him alone in the fires of Gehenna, that ancient place of huan sacrifice to a false god (2 Kings 23:10).  

It was there that we met, and I came to see that my bitterness would be just the right ingredient that would push him over the edge, lost in the abyss forever.  I cannot adequately describe this today, but I was mysteriously driven by grace into something that I once ascribed to Pope Benedict XVI as he left the papacy.  I had to devote myself to "The Sacrifices of a Father's Love." 

Fatherhood is waning in our culture, and the culture has a festering wound because of it. This absence is in no place more evident than in prison where eighty percent of the young men who land here grew up in fatherless homes.  In Pornchai's life, this wound was deeply felt.  Abandoned by his first father, he was sacrificed to the fires of Gehenna by someone who exploited and abused him horribly, and then discarded him.  Pornchai told me one day that I am the only person in his life to always act in his best interest.  

I felt duty bound to make the sacrifices for Pornchai that others should have made, but did not.  This became complicated.  I had to all at once be his friend, his father, his priest, and a mirror of the Church that I had come to resent because it discarded me.  I discovered that to accomplish what I was called to do, there cold be no more "me."  In the process of sacrifice for another, my identity as a man and as a priest was restored.  I cannot explain exactly how, but I never before in my life felt more like a father and a priest han the day Pornchai told me: 

"I woke up today with a future when up to now all I ever had was a past." - Pronchai Moontri.

It was not long after this that Pornchai was received into the Church on Divine Mercy Sunday, 2010.  He chose, a syou know, the name Maximilian as his Christian name.  He chose it in honor of my Patron Saint, Maximilian Kolbe, whose apostolic witness, and undaunted devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mayr was based on one immutable truth: "Love alone creates." 

You might recall that I began this post with the story of Father Francis X. Ford whose life I encountered as I searched for the Mass reading for the First Sunday of Advent.  The Second Reading is from the First Letter of saint Peter (3:18-22): 

"Christ suffered for sins once, the righteous for the sake of the unrighteous, that he might lead you to God.  Put to death in the flesh, he was brought to life in the Spirit.  In it he also went to preach to the spirits in prison..." - 1 Peter 3:18-22

The Great and Terrible Adventure of Sacrificial Love

A friend sent me a story recently, purportedly true, and published in a recent issue of Reader's Digest.  The story is set in a third grade public school classroom. The young teacher was discussing the anatomy of whales.  She mentioned that some of the largest whales eat only tiny marine life because their throats are small.  An eight-year-old boy's hand shot up at this:

Boy:  "My book of Bible stories says the Prophet Jonah was swallowed by a whale."

Teacher:  "That's not possible.  You should not believe everything you read." 

Boy: "But I have to believe the Bible.  God wrote it." 

Teacher: "Well, in this case God was mistaken." 

Boy:  "When I go to heaven, I'll ask Jonah if it's true." 

Teacher: "What if Jonah isn't in heaven?" 

Boy: "Then YOU can ask him." 

The story made me laugh out loud because it takes a surprising turn back onto the antagonist - in this case the teacher.  As much as we dislike suffering in any form, I have found that the mystery of Divine Providence sometimes causes suffereing to make a surprising turn back onto itself.  I wrote a post sometime ago entitled, "Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Gift of Noble Defiance."  The account of Saint Maximilian's gruesome death in an Auschwitz starvation chamber is painful.  At the very same time, it is also hopeful. 

Without the spontaneous sacrifice Maximilian made to exchange his life for a young condemned prisoner, that man would never again have known freedom.  HIs children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren would never have been born.  On a wider scale, the thousands of others suffering in Auschwitz who heard of this story were themselves inspired to respond to evil and suffering with their own noble defiance.  And wider still, the world would have been deprived of this powerful account of the sacrifice of a father's love that has inspired millions.

My friend Pornchai was not drawn to the Catholic faith because of anything he heard or read.  It was because of something he witnessed, something that never wavered.  Shortly after he was received into the Church, Pornchai asked one of his notorious questions.  His head would pop down from his upper bunk in the dark of our prison cell so that he appeared upside down as he asked, "Should we ask God for a happy ending when Father Maximilian never had one?" 

I was left to ponder that question for days before I could answer that.  "You, Pornchai are his happy ending."  I do not know if it was adequate, and I ponder it still, but in the mystery of suffering, immense good has come from this saint.  It leaves me in a terrible spiritual quandary that I have written before.  I despise prison.  I still, after 27 years, feel pangs of bitterness for being falsely accused, and waves of resentment for, as Father Richard John Neuhaus once described, "a Church and a justice system that seem indifferent to justice."  

But I shudder to think of who and where Pornchai might be today ad I not been here.  God did not send me to prison.  That was the work of greedy, lying men and corrupt officials.  But then God did something with it that I could never have imagined.  People write to me now, expressing concern that I must be heartbroken by my friend's absence.  I am not.  I miss him, but behind that is an inexplicable sense of peace that the task given to me by God - a task that could be given to none other - has been fulfilled by the great gift of something that I did not eve know was within me:  the sacrifices of a father's love.

I still hate prison, false witness, and corruption - perhaps now more than ever - but I cannot second guess this magnificent work of Divine Mercy.  Our Church, like the world in which it lives, is permeated with the influence of evil.  It is also filled with the sacrifices of its heros like Father Francis X. Ford, Saint Maximilian Kolbe, and the enduring presence of selfless sacrifice extended back over 2,000 years.  

It's Lnt.  It's late.  It's time to find our way home.  As Saint Peter once asked of Christ - putting all politics aside - "towhom shall we go? You have the words of everlasting life."