BUFFALO - Some of the timeline and finer details escape him now, 50 years gone by, a half-century after the indignity of it all. But he remembers his disappointment, and how admirably all his teammates responded to the bigotry, and those are the important memories for Willie Evans.-ConcordPastor
The sting of racism didn't hurt just Evans, it coursed through all his University of Buffalo teammates, but it has faded considerably during a lifetime spent raising five children with his wife Bobbie, working some 40 years in Buffalo's public school system, coaching nearly every high school sport under the sun, and sharing in the collective thrills and disappointments of his young student-athletes.
Evans was only days short of his 21st birthday, the star black halfback of the UB football team, as the Bulls wrapped up a sensational 8-1 season in 1958. Bone-jarring hits their trademark under coach Dick Offenhamer, the Bulls were awarded the prestigious Lambert Cup as the best small school football program in the Eastern US, and for the first time in school history the modest university on the city's north side, a humble player on the national college football landscape, had a bowl invitation in hand.
The sun and fun of Orlando awaited. The Tangerine Bowl. This at a time when a bowl game carried the luster and cachet of a Cadillac's brilliant chrome grill and bumper...
"Oh, it was big to us," recalled one of Evans's effervescent teammates, Phil "Boom Boom" Bamford, raised in Methuen, Mass., in a tiny lakeside cottage where he slept year-round in a screened porch, awakening some winter mornings to brush snow off his blankets before dashing inside for the warmth of a pot-bellied stove. "The whole city was nuts."
But faster than one of Evans's off-tackle runs, the trip collapsed under the weight of bigotry. Now 71 years old, his neatly cropped hair a frosty white, the distinguished-looking Evans recalled how he first learned that the Bulls had been uninvited, and how it has never made sense.
"Dumb," he says, calmly and quietly flipping through the faded, brittle newspaper clippings tucked in a meticulous scrapbook he kept during that 1958 season. "Just dumb."
Getting the word
The '58 season complete, the seventh of James and Anna Evans's 10 children awoke that morning at the family's Purdy Street home and headed straight to Cook's, his favorite corner delicatessen, to pick up a copy of the morning paper, the Courier Express. Virtually everyone who lived on his street was black, and while he walked along the sidewalk, one of his neighborhood pal's mothers muttered something to him.
"Now you have to remember, this was a time when you didn't really have much conversation with your elders, black or white," said Evans, sitting at the dining room table of his tastefully-appointed downtown condominium. "You were told what to do, and all you did was listen. As I passed Mrs. Davis, all she said was, 'I guess they don't want you black boys down there.' That was it. I didn't know what she was talking about. I just kept walking."
Moments later, while he stood in Cook's with his Courier Express in hand, the front page story brought Mrs. Davis's words into focus.
"UB Rejects Tangerine Bid," read the headline. "Discrimination Is Cause."
The Bulls, with their two black players, Evans and Mike Wilson, a reserve defensive end from New Jersey, weren't going anywhere but back to the Main Street classrooms for the winter. According to the report, the Orlando High School Association, leaseholder of the Tangerine Bowl, forbade blacks and whites from being on a playing field at the same time.
This was an era in the South when blacks routinely were prohibited from using the same public drinking fountains and restrooms as whites and many hotels and restaurants banned African-Americans. The Bulls were free to accept their Tangerine Bowl bid. They could play in the game. But it would mean neither Evans, who lugged the ball 530 yards that season (an impressive 7.6 yards per carry) nor Wilson could be in uniform...
(for the rest of the story)
-Kevin Paul Dupont
By Laurie Goodstein
December 29, 2008
ALUVA, India — In the sticky night air, next to a grove of mahogany trees, nearly 50 young men in madras shirts saunter back and forth along a basketball court, reciting the rosary.
They are seminarians studying to become Roman Catholic priests. Together, they send a great murmuring into the hilly village, mingling with the Muslim call to prayer and the chanting of Vedas from a Hindu temple on a nearby ridge.
Young men willing to join the priesthood are plentiful in India, unlike in the United States and Europe. Within a few miles of this seminary, called Don Bosco College, are two much larger seminaries, each with more than 400 students.
As a result, bishops trek here from the United States, Europe, Latin America and Australia looking for spare priests to fill their empty pulpits. Hundreds have been allowed to go, siphoning support from India’s widespread network of Catholic churches, schools, orphanages, missionary projects and social service programs.
At least 800 Indian priests are working in the United States alone. India, Vietnam and the Philippines are among the leading exporters of priests, according to data compiled by researchers at Catholic University of America in Washington.
But these days the Indian prelates have reason to reconsider their generosity. With India modernizing at breakneck speed, more young men are choosing financial gain over spiritual sacrifice.
“There is a great danger just now because the spirit of materialism is on the increase,” said Bishop Mar James Pazhayattil, the founding bishop of the Diocese of Irinjalakuda, as he sat barefoot at his desk, surrounded by mementos of a lifetime of church service. “Faith and the life of sacrifice are becoming less.
Some of the forces contributing to a lack of priests in Europe and the United States have begun to take shape here.
Parents are having fewer children, with even observant Catholics freely admitting they use birth control. The Indian economy, which has boomed for years, offers more career options.
Many priests once came from large agricultural families. But now land is scarce, the soil tapped out. Families are moving to cities, far from the tight-knit parishes that for generations kept Indian Catholics connected to their faith. And educated young Catholics are increasingly attracted to fields like engineering and technology.
In past generations, having a son become a priest increased the family’s stature, said the Rev. Jose Kuriedath, a sociologist in Aluva who has written a book about vocations in India. Mr. Kuriedath recounted an adage in Malayalam, the local language: “It is equal in dignity to have either an elephant or a priest in the family.”
But this is changing...
(read the complete article)
-ConcordPastor
This weekend we celebrate Epiphany - on January 4th. Yes, we used to celebrate Epiphany as the Twelfth Day of Christmas and in many places that's still the case. In the United States, however, the feast is transferred to Sunday.
Portrait by Robert ShetterlyCatholic peacemaker Jim Harney, who promoted justice for the world’s poor through photography, lectures and retreats throughout the U.S. and Canada, died Dec. 26 after a protracted bout with cancer.
The 68-year-old former Catholic priest first gained notoriety as one of the Milwaukee 14, a group of priests and faith-based peace activists who burned some 10,000 Selective Service records with homemade napalm in a Sept. 24, 1968, protest against the Vietnam War.My time at the major seminary in Brighton overlapped Jim Harney's by only a year so I did not know him well on a personal level. But I knew something of his story even then and certainly as his commitment drew him deeper and deeper into the fray with powers that oppress.
Beginning in the 1980s, Harney lived and visited much of Latin America, the Caribbean and Iraq to document photographically the impact of economic globalization and war on the world’s poor. He also has led retreats for people seeking to tie together the work for justice and their faith life.
Most recently he was an artist in residence at Posibilidad in Bangor, Maine, a nonprofit center which seeks to engage people in conversation about those excluded from society.
Harney is being remembered by justice advocates as a wise elder whose concern for the struggles of poor people will continue to serve as an inspiration in their work.
In reviewing comments submitted on posts here, there are two kinds that I find most difficult to deal with.
Divine Recruits:-ConcordPastor
Serving U.S. Parishes, Fathers Without Borders
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
December 28, 2008
OAK GROVE, Ky. — The Rev. Chrispin Oneko, hanging up his vestments after leading one of his first Sunday Masses at his new American parish, was feeling content until he discovered several small notes left by his parishioners.
The notes, all anonymous, conveyed the same message: Father, please make your homilies shorter. One said that even five minutes was too long for a mother with children.
At home in Kenya, Father Oneko had preached to rural Africans who walked for hours to get to church and would have been disappointed if the sermons were brief.
“Here the whole Mass is one hour,” he said, a broad smile on his round face. “That was a homework for me, to learn to summarize everything and make the homily 10 minutes, maybe 15. Here, people are on the move very fast.”
Father Oneko is part of a wave of Roman Catholic priests from Africa, Asia and Latin America who have been recruited to fill empty pulpits in parishes across America. They arrive knowing how to celebrate Mass, anoint the sick and baptize babies. But few are prepared for the challenges of being a pastor in America.
Father Oneko, 46, had never counseled parishioners like those he found here at St. Michael the Archangel Catholic Church. Many are active-duty or retired military families coping with debt, racial prejudice, multiple deployments to war zones and post-traumatic stress disorder. Nor did he have any idea how to lead the multimillion-dollar fund-raising campaign the parishioners had embarked on, hoping to build an octagonal church with a steeple to replace their red brick parish hall.
Cutting his sermons short was, in some ways, the least of Father Oneko’s worries when he arrived here in 2004. He did not understand the African-American experience. He had never dealt with lay people so involved in running their church. And yet, in the end, the families of his church would come to feel an affinity with their gentle new pastor, reaching out to him in his hour of need, just as he had tended to them in theirs.
To the volunteers at St. Michael’s, it was clear that Father Oneko was out of his element in many ways. Marie Lake, the church’s volunteer administrator, and her husband, Fred, often invited him for dinner.
“My husband was driving him down 41A and there was a big old statue of Uncle Sam,” said Mrs. Lake, who owns an accounting business and keeps the church’s books. “He thought it was Sam from Sam’s Club wholesale.”
To help him along, the Lakes gave Father Oneko a high school textbook on American history and government.
“Many years ago we sent our missionaries to Africa, and now they’re sending missionaries here,” Mrs. Lake said. “It’s strange how that goes.”
In this largely rural, largely white area of Western Kentucky, the Rev. Darrell Venters, who is in charge of recruiting priests for the Diocese of Owensboro, knew that some of his parishes would never accept Father Oneko, who is short, stout and very dark-skinned.
But Father Venters thought that Father Oneko and St. Michael’s, a parish on the outskirts of a big military base, with its racial mix and many families who had lived abroad, was a good bet.
“We knew if any parish would accept him, it would be this one,” Father Venters said...
(complete article here)
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
December 27, 2008
OWENSBORO, Ky. — Sixteen of the Rev. Darrell Venters’s fellow priests are running themselves ragged here, each serving three parishes simultaneously. One priest admits he stood at an altar once and forgot exactly which church he was in.
So Father Venters, lean and leathery as the Marlboro man — a cigarette in one hand and a cellphone with a ring tone like a church bell in the other — spends most of his days recruiting priests from overseas to serve in the small towns, rolling hills and farmland that make up the Roman Catholic Diocese of Owensboro.
He sorts through e-mail and letters from foreign priests soliciting jobs in America, many written in formal, stilted English. He is looking, he said, for something that shouts: “This priest is just meant for Kentucky!”
“If we didn’t get international priests,” he said, “some of our guys would have had five parishes. If one of our guys were to leave, or God forbid have a heart attack and die, we didn’t have anyone to fill in.”
In the last six years, he has brought 12 priests from Africa, Asia and Latin America who are serving in this diocese covering the western third of Kentucky, where a vast majority of residents are white. His experiences offer a close look at the church’s drive to import foreign priests to compensate for a dearth of Americans, and the ways in which this trend is reshaping the Roman Catholic experience in America.
One of six diocesan priests now serving in the United States came from abroad, according to “International Priests in America,” a large study published in 2006. About 300 international priests arrive to work here each year. Even in American seminaries, about a third of those studying for the priesthood are foreign-born.
Father Venters has seen lows. Some foreign priests had to be sent home. One became romantically entangled with a female co-worker. One isolated himself in the rectory. Still another would not learn to drive. A priest from the Philippines left after two weeks because he could not stand the cold. A Peruvian priest was hostile toward Hispanics who were not from Peru.
“From a strictly personnel perspective,” Father Venters said one day over a lunch of potato soup with American cheese and a glass of sweet tea, “the international priests are easier to work with than the local priests. If they mess up, you just say, ‘See you.’ You withdraw your permission for them to stay.”
But there have been victories as well, when Kentucky Catholics who once did not know Nigeria from Uganda opened their eyes to the conditions in the countries their foreign priests came from — even raising $6,000 to install wells in the home village of a Nigerian priest serving in Owensboro.
“You’re taking a shot in the dark getting these guys,” Father Venters said. “But honestly, other than a few, we have had really, really good results.”
...
(for the rest of the story)
Whole Holy Family is a contemporary piece by Bro. Michael McGrath depicting Anne and Joachim, Mary and Joseph and the Christ Child.Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary,
that never was it known
that anyone who fled to your protection,
implored your help, or sought your intercession
was left unaided.
Inspired by this confidence, I fly unto you,
O Virgin of virgins, my mother;
to you do I come, before you I stand,
sinful and sorrowful.
O Mother of the Word Incarnate,
despise not my petitions,
but in your mercy hear and answer me. Amen.
The Holy Kinship by Geertgen tot SintPart of the enjoyment of blogging is searching out artwork to illustrate the posts. It wasn't easy to choose which piece to use for the post on St. Anne and St. Joachim but I decided that Bro. McGrath's Whole Holy Family was just right. The runner up was a late 15th century oil painting (on the left) by Geertgen tot Sint, entitled The Holy Kinship.
“Although the canonical books of the New Testament never mention the parents of the Virgin Mary, traditions about her family, childhood, education, and eventual betrothal to Joseph developed very early in the history of the church. The oldest and most influential account of this kind is the apocryphal gospel called the Protevangelium of James (which) fell under a cloud in the fourth and fifth centuries when it was accused of "absurdities" by St. Jerome and condemned as untrustworthy by Popes Damasus, Innocent I, and Gelasius. Jerome's most explicit complaint was that it explained the brothers of Jesus… as Joseph's sons by an earlier marriage. In the interpretation preferred by Jerome and the Western Church, the so-called brothers are interpreted as cousins of Jesus, sons of Mary's sisters, thus allowing both Joseph and Mary to be envisioned as lifelong virgins...
“Anne was initially just a minor character in the legend derived from the Protevangelium. But her role was capable of great significance because of what it could imply about the Virgin Mary and about the workings of God in this world. Christians were obviously curious from the start about when and why God had selected Mary for her unique position as the mother of the Redeemer. The legend attempts to answer such questions by borrowing from Biblical stories about other long-awaited children, including Isaac, Samson, John the Baptist, and especially Samuel; thus Mary becomes both a child of destiny, heralded before birth as a chosen instrument in the redemption of God's people, and a sign of God's favor toward her parents, a virtuous couple who had long been barren...
“Anne also played a useful role for medieval commentators on the Bible when they attempted to explain the extended family of Jesus. As mentioned earlier, Jerome had argued successfully that the "brothers" mentioned in the Gospels were Jesus’ cousins, sons of Mary's sisters. Biblical commentators in the early medieval West went on to identify those sisters with two other Mary’s mentioned in the Gospels, to take Anne as the mother of all three, and to explain the names of her second and third daughters by creating the theory of the trinubium, or three marriages of Anne. According to the trinubium, Joachim must have died soon after the birth of the Virgin Mary, so that Anne could marry a second husband named Cleophas, by whom she bore Mary Cleophas, and (after Cleophas's death) a third husband named Salome, by whom she bore Mary Salome. From these three daughters, the theory continued, came Jesus and all six "brothers" or cousins named in the Gospels. James the lesser or younger, Joseph or Joses, Simon, and Jude were explained as the sons of Mary Cleophas, who had married Alpheus; James the Greater and John the Evangelist, as the sons of Mary Salome, who had married Zebedee. Thus Anne became the grandmother of some of the most prominent apostles, as well as Jesus himself.
“The trinubium theory was condemned in the twelfth century and later by a number of theologians, who felt that multiple marriages and additional children were incompatible with the purity and holiness that must have characterized the Virgin's mother, and some Biblical scholars rejected it on the grounds that it depended on misinterpretations of particular names and details...”Although rejected, the trinubium made its presence felt in art - and that brings us back to The Holy Kinship. This work plays out the theory of Anne's three marriages, depicting Anne on the left with a book in her lap and beside her are Mary and the Christ child. On the right are Elizabeth and her son, John the Baptist and in the background are various of Anne's apocryphal spouses and their children - all gathered together in church. Or, as I look it, this painting offers a 15th century version not unlike the scene at our Sunday 9:30 Mass!
I've tightened up the sidebar a bit and added some new links under the title, Blogs Near and Far.
As you have seen, my posting has been light this week and some of it rerun from last year. It's amazing how much energy the Christmas Eve and Day schedule can drain from you: ask any cleric, church musician or sacristan!
Per shum vjet Krishtlindjen
Честито Рождество Христово
Dibenitan Kristnaskon kaj prosperan novjaron.
Häid joulupühi.
Hyvää Joulua.
Heureuse et sainte fête de Noël !
Que le Christ Sauveur vous garde dans l’espérance
et qu’il vous fasse le don de la paix profonde !
Selamat Hari Natal.
Nollaig shona dhaoibh go léir.
Buon Natale agli abitanti di Roma e dell’intera Italia! La grande festa della nascita di Cristo sia fonte di luce e di fiducia per la vita di tutti. In questo nostro tempo, segnato da una considerevole crisi economica, possa il Natale essere occasione di più grande solidarietà tra le famiglie e tra le comunità che compongono la cara Nazione italiana. Dalla povera e umile grotta di Betlemme si diffonda dappertutto la luce della speranza evangelica e risuoni l’annuncio che nessuno è estraneo all’amore del Redentore.
Gumya umutima mu mahoro! Noeli nziza!
Apparuit gratia Dei Salvatoris nostri omnibus hominibus!Priecīgus Ziemsvētkus!
Feliz Natal para todos, e que a Luz de Cristo Salvador ilumine os vossos corações de paz e de esperança!
Среħан Божиħ - Христос се роди!
Milostiplné a radostné Viacočné Sviatky.
Noel bayrami kutlu olsun.
