Holy Cross - September 14

No Cross, No Crown.

When I was a pastor at Visitation Parish in Philadelphia, our Vietnamese Community celebrated a great feast by inviting a Vietnamese Archbishop. I concelebrated the Mass and afterward joined the parishioners for a grand dinner at a fine Vietnamese restaurant in South Philadelphia. I was seated with the Archbishop and enjoyed my conversation with him.

I was taken by this man. There was something about him that drew me. Something almost "mystical". I became fixed on his pectoral cross and chain. All bishops wear a pectoral cross over their heart. In most cases they appear to be fine jewelry. The one I was looking at was quite crude and imperfect. The chain actually looked like something kids might make at summer camp. Anyway, I finally worked up enough courage to ask the bishop about it. When I did, he turned red and I knew I had intruded into a private area. But he obliged me.

Archbishop Francis X. Nguyen had been a prisoner in a communist camp in Vietnam for many years. he told me that to pass the time he would gather pieces of thread and wire and gradually he fashioned what I was looking at and inquiring about.

Here was a man who had carried a cross. Here was a man who had cried as Jesus, in the solitary life of a prisoner My God, My God, why have you abandoned me! He knew isolation. The heartache of not being able to exercise his ministry as priest and bishop.

He never told me any details of his imprisonment but I learned of them later in books and periodicals and from Vietnamese priests.

...and we complain about our crosses, don't we?
Sadly we do.
...being stuck in traffic.
...having to curb our life style by a down turn in the economy.
...adjusting schedules to care for aging parents.
...impatient with our own personal aging and weakness

We complain about these crosses. Forgetting, that if there is no cross there will be no crown.
No Cross! No Glory!

Let us examine our Crosses more closely.
Pray for the grace to carry them as Christ did.
And look to victory by "Lifting high the Cross we are given".

Pax et bonum.

(I am going silent for two weeks - R&R time. Pray for me until then)