A Christmas Carol for New Year’s

Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol is the perfect vehicle in which to travel from Christmas to New Year’s. Past, present, and future haunt Scrooge. Redemption comes because he really sees a child who suffers after a life without charity and justice. Make the journey with me through our own past, present, and future.

PAST: the death of German theologian Johann Baptist Metz brings to mind Ludmila Javorova, ordained a Roman Catholic priest in Czechoslovakia. The obituary of Metz in The New York Times notes that “Early in his career he clandestinely taught priests, including married men, who had been secretly ordained in Czechoslovakia when Communist governments were restricting religious activities.” No mention there of Ludmila, as we call her; but Chapter Eight of Out of the Depths by Miriam Therese Winter does not mention names of the theologians who conducted the seminars, either.  Learning philosophy was a great joy to Ludmila, and reading about Metz is enlightening about the kind of theology she probably learned there and put into practice for the underground church, especially in prisons, after her ordination, described in detail in Winter’s 2001 book.

PRESENT: Who else but Greta Thunberg? If you need me to provide links to her message, you have not been paying attention! Finally, an innocent proclaims the need to change our wasteful, selfish ways IMMEDIATELY and the whole world listens! But does the world change? Do we change? Our small efforts are not enough, as necessary as they are so that we change our hearts and habits. We also need wise and courageous politicians to make the kind of change that will begin to avert disaster, which leads me to the other person I might have chosen: Nancy Pelosi, who is NCR’s person of the year. Nancy, follow the Pope of Laudato Si and preach the Gospel with Greta.

FUTURE: Everybody writing about the appointment of Filipino Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle as the prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples suggests that he might be the next Pope. I can’t tell you how cheered I am by these articles, especially Joshua McElwee’s in NCR. I am as fearful about the future of the church as I am about the future of the earth. I want Francis to choose prelates in Rome who can continue his vision. This congregation used to be known as the Propagation of the Faith, which means that its responsibility is the whole third world, the global south. It’s a tough job but this is the church of growth, the church of the future. Despite the old canard, “he who enters the conclave Pope emerges Cardinal,” I believe that the Curia does not need to be populated by those who want to obstruct the Francis agenda. Robert Mickens in LaCroix International includes all the detail you might wish about the politics of this appointment – but once, for New Year’s, I want to focus on the hope of a renewed Vatican, a church we can believe in from the manger in our worship spaces to the one in St. Peter’s Square.