The CatholiCity Message

Volume XIX, Number 8 – September 4, 2015

Dear CatholiCity Citizen,

Wow. Your response to my Kitchen Sink Message Part 1 has been fantastic (bye the bye, we still have a couple dozen single copies of those amazing NFP CDs described therein, if you want one). We'll open today's message with a prayer, and then, as promised, end with the first two paragraphs from my upcoming fourth novel. Today's Part 2 contains mostly longer reflections, so skim and browse or actually read every word according to the promptings of your heart (or the schedule of your day!). I hope to email you Kitchen Sink Part 3 sometime next week. Enjoy your holiday weekend. Hey, ho, let's go!

Two Saints I Know
My elderly mother, Patricia, who bore twelve children, is slowly recovering from double bypass open heart surgery she endured yesterday. Although logic tells me she cannot be perfect, nevertheless she is in my eyes, and is one of the few people I know who is a bonafide saint. She has all her wits, has always been physically strong, and has overcome late-stage lymph cancer and decades of diabetes. I joke with her that she is a very hard person to kill, but this heart situation was and remains a close call. I long for God to give her another ten or fifteen years to enjoy her thirty-nine grandchildren (and my sons to relish her cooking). Please take a moment to recall by name your own ailing loved ones (seriously, pause and bring them to mind), as we pray in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit:

Dear Jesus, please send the Archangel Raphael to heal our relatives and friends suffering from illness and disease, even if a miracle is required, within your holy will. We confidently ask for the intercession of Saints Anthony, Jude, Joseph, Therese, and Josemaria, along with all our own relatives and their angels to answer my prayer and the prayers of every CatholiCity Citizen as soon as possible. Amen.

As for the second saint, I won't tell you his name, but there is an abortion clinic located within a few hundred yards from my home, just around the corner from the end of my street. There are peaceful Christians of every stripe praying outside every day (including me, fewer times than I would like to admit). For many years one man has anchored the supernatural battle. He is quite fit, not very tall, in his late fifties—he reminds me of Jack Lalanne. He stands facing the street on the sidewalk of the abortuary, smiling, serenely holding a simple, thin, body-length wooden cross, for hours on end, day and evening, day after day, year after year. He never shifts his feet or shows any hint of discomfort or impatience. All day long hundreds of prolifers honk or give him a thumbs up as they drive by, looking forward to his even wider smile and childlike wave. I have never met another person whose imitation of Christ so closely resembles the Eucharist in the Tabernacle of a Catholic Church. A saint.

The Astoundingly Great Cost of One Baptism
In an era where research is showing a greater percentage younger baptized Catholics not practicing the faith or even identifying as Catholic, it got me thinking about how you and I became Catholic. Unless we were adult converts, most of our parents had us baptized during infancy, forever altering our souls and giving us a supernaturally-derived ability to believe divine truths. Somebody has to baptize somebody or there are no Christians and there is no Catholic Church.

Additionally, you have personally experienced the sacrifice (and joys) associated with living your faith year-after-year, decade-after-decade—your lifetime of struggles, Confessions, prayer, temptation, Holy Communions, love, and not-being-like-everybody else. Now multiply your life experience by hundreds of individuals over the generations, including thousands of supportive priests, nuns, and fellow parishioners. It is a fact: two thousand years ago one particular person in your line lived in the Holy Land, or Asia Minor, or Rome, or elsewhere and became a Catholic because of his or her direct contact with one of the original twelve apostles. Twelve men and their friends, one baptism at a time, one complete Catholic life at a time, became well over one billion Catholics today, and you are one of them. Counting our separated and beloved Protestant brothers and sisters, there are two and half billion baptized souls on this mortal coil today.

And if just one of your forebears over those two thousand years had fallen away, the chain of baptisms would have been broken and you would almost certainly not be a Catholic. Given the near universal use of contraception over the past century, you probably would not have even been born. That was the cost of your baptism: a vast unbroken chain of faithful lives and everything each life entailed for twenty centuries.

And the truly astounding cost for every fallen away soul who rejects the gift of baptism in our generation is that the amazing twenty-century-long chain is broken into the future, frustrating the Father's unfathomable plans before the return of Christ, perhaps for hundreds of years, because fallen away Catholics, in general, don't have children. What a waste.

On the Importance of Holy Old Ladies
I often receive heart-breaking letters and emails from mothers and fathers of my mother's generation whose close family members have tragically rejected the faith and its practice for numerous reasons. Often these family members also spurn loving attempts to even discuss religious matters. I remind my beloved CatholiCity Senior Citizens that because you have remained faithful to the sacramental life you are the most important and powerful members of your families, whose souls depend for salvation to some mysteriously unknowable degree, in the Body of Christ, upon their grandmothers and grandfathers' prayers, reparations, fasting, and suffering good works. Take heart. Embrace hope. Trust in God's mercy; be the saints your fallen-away relatives need you to be. In the mystical body of Christ, your Rosaries, your fasting, your confessions, your worthy reception of the Eucharist, your charity and self-sacrifice in service to your loved ones shall be the difference between conversion and even potential salvation at the moment before their deaths, and hopefully, many years before it comes to that.

Along with priests, deacons, and consecrated nuns and brothers, you holy old ladies (and gentlemen) are the greatest resource in the Catholic Church. Remain in a state of grace, and like Saint Ignatius, look forward to death, though may it come in days or in decades, for there in the Court of Heaven your role in helping Christ the King save souls will multiply beyond your wildest dreams. Plus, you get to be with the queen.

One Outta Three Ain't Bad
January and February of 2015 marked the deaths of three well-known Catholic men closely associated with Notre Dame, my alma mater; I met each man on several occasions. Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, longtime president of the University of Notre Dame, was (and is) an endlessly lionized hero of liberal Catholics. Fr. Richard McBrien was an infamous liberal dissenter, subversive textbook author, frequent national tv propagandist, and diocesan (!) newspaper columnist. Professor Charles Rice was a Marine, father of ten, prolific Catholic writer, political activist, and influential legal educator. Their passing represents the end of an American Catholic era during which each man dominated in his own way.

I was a freshman when Hesburgh came to our dorm for a visit in 1984; he shed tears when I asked him to share his dreams as a young man. Turns out he longed to be a missionary but felt pressed into endless service as an administrator. "Ted the Head" (as we nicknamed him) probably caused as much harm to the Catholic Church in America as any figure in twentieth century, including working with John D. Rockefeller to quietly organize extremely effective conferences at Notre Dame in the late 1950s and early 1960s with the goal of undermining (and overturning) Catholic teaching on contraception years before Humanae Vitae.

Although I personally felt the lash of his sarcasm and witnessed the negative effects of his influence, I'll remember McBrien as a diocesan priest for whose soul I offered thousands of daily Rosaries.

Charles Rice was a true renaissance man. His son Joe was one of my closest friends at Notre Dame so I was a frequent guest to Rice's office and home, where I always enjoyed lengthy discussions with his wise wife. Given all the famous hats he wore, our small cohort of devout Catholic students at Notre Dame lovingly referred to him a Professor-Colonel-Doctor Charlie. Always direct, he never wrote or spoke in a Chestertonian style, yet there was nevertheless an air of G.K.'s beloved paradox about the man: tough yet friendly, brilliant yet accessible, combative yet serene. He died the day before Hesburgh. Semper Fi and RIP.

Just One Quote

All the good works in the world are not equal to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass because they are the works of men; but the Mass is the work of God. Martyrdom is nothing in comparison for it is but the sacrifice of man to God; but the Mass is the sacrifice of God for man.
– Saint John Vianney

Thanks. Let me know the details when your prayers are answered. And now, as promised, please find below the first few pages of my fourth novel, tentatively entitled Today is the Wound, which will hopefully be ready for publication after Christmas. Please pray for me after you receive Holy Communion. I pray for you every day when I receive...

With Mary,

William "Bud" Macfarlane

The following excerpt from Today is the Wound, is Copyrighted 2015, William N. Macfarlane II

A Confluence of Genetic Improbabilities

He was the janitor, glorified, and missing only one finger. There were virtually no photographs of him, except on his driver's license and a few in a deeply secure, red-colored government files stamped the highest levels of secret. He had avoided having his picture taken since he became old enough to realize the lies they tell. Nor did he take photos, or have picture albums, hardcopy or electronic, and never used the astoundingly tiny camera on his cellphone. When friends sent him pics accompanying their texts, he responded, but quickly deleted them.

His fastidious and crafty avoidance of a visual record of his stay on this earth had been reinforced by the dawn of the digital age and the commoditization of photography. Like everybody else, he had heard the legend proclaiming certain Native American tribes considered photography theft of the soul and this always made him smile inwardly, and, to despise all the more Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and their doubtlessly endless iterations. Our eyes, silently deceiving us as deftly as we breath air, are virtually always left unguarded and casually so. Stuff comes in through the senses, the eyes foremost, as these students were learning at the college where he was employed; Aristotle had nailed it. The only relative he had ever known, his paternal grandfather, had told him several times that one should believe "nothing you hear and half of what you see." Or perhaps when the janitor was nineteen he fell in love with a beautiful girl with a black heart and she broke his.

Decades ago, the principal of his high school wrote a college recommendation letter for him. The man, one Mr. Anthony Stanesi, was a man of impeccable virtue, a towering gentleman with an assured Italian New Jersey preference for dashing, shiny grey suits adorning jet black shirts and silver-toned ties. After a detailed, embarrassingly sincere listing of the young man's fine but not particularly brilliant scholastic achievements, exemplary athletic prowess, and lauding his intuitive cast of mind, the august Mr. Stanesi concluded with a flourish that his student was "destined for greatness." The janitor reflected upon Stanesi's prophesy with sardonic regret.

These days, whenever a few moments to reflect presented themselves while he was ambling across the quiet campus of the little Catholic college where he was employed, he was much more inclined to review the past through the reliably, poignantly, beautifully inaccurate lens of human memory, his own and of others, fortified by the copious notes he scratched on yellow legal paper most evenings.

Back in fifth grade, now forty years past, his portly and excitable English teacher, Mrs. Dunmeyer, told him the story of a maintenance man employed by a jewelry factory who had asked for written permission from his bemused boss to take home the corporate garbage. The infinitesimally tiny gold and silver particles in the dust from his nightly sweepings, which the janitor sifted over decades, allowed him to retire a wealthy man.

Fabricated Horatio Alger tale or not, she did not point out to him or his classmates that the gold in the story was worthless compared to the resourcefulness of one particular working man, but her young student understood well enough then what experience had reinforced since: that the important realities were the broom on the factory floor, the shooh-shoosh sound of sifter expertly shaken by callused hands after hours, the dust itself, and the courage it took for the old negro to ask the guys in monkey suits for permission (he always pictured the janitor as a black man).

Now the student was decades past a grown man, a keeper of stories, inadvertent stand-in father, friend to men and women all over the country, an efficient killer, and a janitor himself; he sifted moments in the lives of these college kids he loved so much, trusting for gold he could not see while cherishing the dust he could.

One time the boys had tried to nickname him Darts when he had first arrived at the college. Lolling in what Aquinas described as (and our janitor joyfully sought) a morally acceptable state of inebriation at Gary's pub in downtown Moreno, he had tossed twenty-three consecutive bull's-eyes, the last few blindfolded, while singing Pange Lingua in deep basso—or was it thirty-two? However many the number, it would have been more if he had used his slightly better hand, the one sans his ring finger—and had he contrived a few more stanzas.

Ah, music was real. Photos were not. That was his truth. Music is mathematics made beautiful; a sidewinder into the heart, guiding sharp notes parabolically to target. Either way, the darts had stuck, but the nickname had not. He was Thomas Jonathan Smith, and to the undergrads here, Tom. Just Tom.

End of Excerpt