Posted on 05/16/2024 8:16:59 AM PDT by ebb tide
Before the start of Mass in a Mexican town last week, a wounded American bishop looked into a sea of teenage girls who had, he’d been told, been hurt in inhumane ways. Three thousand or so girls stood before him at Villa de Las Niñas in blue skirts, white blouses, bobby socks, and black saddle shoes. These were Mexico’s bullied ones from Guerrero, Oaxaca, Durango, Veracruz, Puebla, Jalisco, and numberless other poor villages.
In the silence of the mammoth gymnasium, the wounded looked into the eyes of the wounded. Sorrow wrung the bishop’s heart. A few sisters had told him stories of their spiritual daughters’ afflictions, so his eyes moistened as he blessed himself to begin the Sacrifice of the Mass. The abandoned girls were raised in villages bathed in human trafficking, murder, addiction, and violence.
Girlstown was the right place for the bishop to be last week. Although the girls had been hurt in unspeakable ways, the bishop also knew he had been pulled into a humble kingdom of resurrection, where endless lines of girls stood like thousands of Jairus’ daughters—dead, risen, and looking for how to move forward. With clasped hands and their eyes turned to the bishop they didn’t know, he blessed himself, in persona Christi, to begin the Mass.
En el nombre del Padre y del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo.
The girls were startled. This American spoke in their tongue—fluently! And far, far away, seemingly thousands of rows from the altar in the rear, 46 Sisters of Mary smiled. The sisters knew their forsaken daughters would begin to see him as one of their own, though not in the ways and the depth they could have known.
The bishop was commissioned by Pope Benedict in 2012 to go forth and pastor flocks, bear fruit, and bring the leaven of the Gospel to the mistreated, broken, and alienated. Since being relieved by Pope Francis as shepherd of Tyler, Texas, last fall, Bishop Joseph Strickland has had to tend to those very wounds in himself.
The Whisky Priest in The Power and the Glory comes to mind. It’s the broken and marginalized—the outcasts—who know the injustice of mankind and push on despite it. Like Graham Greene’s fugitive priest stumbling from place to place through the night to calm the frightened in the faith-starved homes of Tabasco, Bishop Strickland now moves on the peripheries. With a heart consumed with shepherding and fulfilling his sacramental duties—and with forces bearing down upon him—he searches out places of trauma, like Girlstown, to bring healing. It’s the broken best able to heal the broken; and it is by their fruit that they will be known.
Before Venerable Aloysius Schwartz died of ALS in 1992, he urged the religious order he founded to serve by wearing “a constant crown of thorns.” When the Sisters of Mary heard the bishop’s Spanish, they may have wondered if he’d make the choice to join in. They knew his gift of Spanish could better reach their spiritual daughters’ wounds.
When the army of girls began dispersing from the gymnasium after Mass, a tiny girl who brought to mind Cindy Lou Who craned her neck and whispered with saucer-eyes: Padre, podrías escuchar mi confesión? The bishop smiled and led her to a quiet place in a corner for confession. Thereafter, a line formed that seemed to stretch to the American border wall; the wounded waited to be healed, one by one, by the wounded healer.
Yes, the sisters knew then, he would wear their crown. They didn’t know he already wore one.
“These girls come here broken, and the Sisters of Mary pray and work hard to heal their trauma” Bishop Strickland said. “The wounded become healed here by women who want no fanfare. It is the work of God.”
For the next five days, the bishop entered into, dissolved, and became one with girls with Mexico’s deepest wounds. They began to seek him out for confession and walk the oval track with him; some hesitantly told stories from their childhoods that remain like houses of horror in their minds. They shed tears, and the bishop’s eyes glistened. Each child at Girlstown, in some fashion, has been beaten down by poverty and physical, mental, and sexual abuse. The Sisters of Mary travel each year to their villages, two-by-two, as rescuers of girls who’ve endured magnificent evil. For the next five days, the bishop entered into, dissolved, and became one with girls with Mexico’s deepest wounds.
Girlstown rests peaceably behind tall stone walls in the bustling town of Chalco, where the barks of mangy dogs, the explosion of firecrackers, and the thrumming of upbeat merengue and salsa from passing cars never seems to end. In the stories he was told, Bishop Strickland saw Christ nailed to the cross at the vibrant Catholic boarding school, but he also saw right away that the place wasn’t Golgotha. He heard stories where it annually gave birth to numberless unseen resurrections, where for five years the girls are mothered back to health by sisters who work to strip away the memories of the agony of their pasts.
“I began to see the Sisters of Mary’s work as woven into the priest’s call—my own call—to suffer and offer sacrifice with no fanfare,” Bishop Strickland said. “Their ministry of sacrifice and relentless work for souls is the same as the High Priest of Jesus Christ…as a bishop, I, too, am called to enter into that type of sacrifice and suffering. Otherwise, my priesthood isn’t authentic.”
So, with his crown of thorns, Bishop Strickland kept grabbing his purple stole and finding quiet places to hear the children’s pain. The sisters kept smiling; his love for their spiritual daughters unfolded like shafts of variegated light each day. As the sisters scurried past him to get to a building, chapel, or workshop, they kept seeing the witness of a priest of Jesus Christ, the Poor Man of Nazareth. They saw that, like their founder, Fr. Al, he was a father to the forsaken and poor.
As the week progressed, the sisters, too, began to come to him. They, too, had wounds. The majority had also been raised in hardscrabble towns before experiencing the power of Christ. Thereafter, the bishop began to walk the track and listen to the sisters’ stories. He counseled and heard their confessions. And when a sister cried over a memory or injustice, he looked into her eyes with penetrating warmth. He knew their pain in a way they didn’t understand.
On the first day, he told the sisters he would gladly expose the Blessed Sacrament before dawn each morning and join them for Adoration. After an hour, as sunrays pushed over a pair of twin volcanoes, he offered Mass for the sisters. At around the midpoint of Mass, when a soft alarm sounded in each of four seven-story buildings, a wild thumping echoed throughout the valley; it was the footfall of hundreds of children leaping from bunk beds to begin another day of school. Since 1964, when the Sisters of Mary were founded, children have known a mother-sister would soon emerge after Mass to pour milk into their cereal bowls, check their fingernails, straighten the hem of their skirts, lead them in prayer; all the things mothers do for their children.
The mother-sisters knew the girls were fraught with anxiety this particular week. The upcoming weekend, eighty or so buses and large cargo vans would carry the girls’ family members past the heavy iron gates of Girlstown for reunion weekend. Many of the girls knew hugs, stories from the village, and happy tears would make sudden pivots into indelicate conversations. The sisters had catechized their spiritual daughters with the Truth of Christ’s teaching in the Gospel and had unwittingly made them evangelists and missionaries.
The family dynamic would soon become inverted, where the child would evangelize the parent. Accordingly, many of the girls were struggling with the proper tact and right words while encouraging a mom, dad, or sibling to holiness.
Madre, it’s time to move out of the man’s home; he is not your husband.
Daddy, it’s time for you to return to Mass. Pray hard, Daddy. The priest in the village will hear your confession.
You will die in the narco world, brother. I love you and have been praying to Our Lady of Guadalupe for you to leave the gang. (She doesn’t mention her fasts and emotional and bodily mortifications). I can’t wait for summer break to come so we can take long walks together. I can’t wait to tell you what the sisters taught me about God’s love.
Because the girls knew their words could be received as lit sticks of dynamite, they offered their family spiritual bouquets, which were small and humble gifts of art that listed the number of sacrifices, Rosaries, Divine Mercy chaplets, weekday Masses, and acts of charity they had offered for their families.
Bishop Strickland had been told of the girls’ anxieties and travails. So, during Mass on the day before he departed, he spoke to the fear and confusion that lay in 3,000 strained hearts. On the Feast Day of St. Joseph the Worker, he urged in his homily for the girls to remain humble and charitable—but strong in the Truth—when they evangelized and shared the Gospel with family members. He said St. Joseph’s humility and quiet inner strength was the ideal blueprint to follow. He urged them to be little shrines of encouragement for their families.
And in the back of the gym, the sisters smiled. The priest had loved, shepherded, and—stunningly—spoken the perfect words to calm and strengthen their spiritual daughters. But the sisters didn’t know he was the Whisky Priest, a hurt man who understood pain on a deeper level.
Thereafter, a most charming event emerged. The next day, before the crack of dawn, at Adoration, the sisters began to kneel more closely to the monstrance and to the bishop. In a way the sisters could not have known, they seemed to make of themselves a wall of maternal love, a tilma of protection, for the bishop they once barely knew but now began to intimately understand.
A few days after leaving Chalco, back at his small home in the piney woods outside of the city center of Tyler, Bishop Strickland asked: I wonder if the sisters would consider having me back?
How to help: World Villages for Children (WVC) is a nonprofit organization that financially supports the Sisters of Mary as they help children break free from a life of poverty and lead them to Christ. WVC provides food, shelter, clothing, medical expenses, Catholic education, and vocational training to more than 20,000 children in Boystowns and Girlstowns in six different countries around the world. To donate to World Villages for Children, please go to https://www.worldvillages.org/poverty/.
Ping
Much in there I am glad to read, including that Bp. Strickland is still able to exercise his vocation.
The healing power of God’s love... thank you for sharing this!
Thanks for the post.
I don’t care for Greene, and the Power and the Glory is over-rated, but it is by far his best work that I have read (and I’ve read well over half of his works in hopes that he would have one at least close to the Power and the Glory’s equal), and it is used very well in this article.
I was tempted to ping the “Bishops are no good gang” to this thread, but see you have caucused it.
The Power and the Glory worked for me. I would recommend it.
Thanks for posting this. I hope Bishop Strickland inspires other bishops.
You can do a lot worse, including, so far as I can tell, any other thing that Greene ever wrote.
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