Jim Burkart’s remarks about The Serpent and the Dove

Your book arrived while I was down with flu. Thank you for it;  I have since read it.  Robbinsdale and the autobiographic items were a very pleasant surprise.

Concerning Andrew Greeley, Fr. Coughlin, and Bishop Sheen, I wonder if they were worth the detailed examination.  Coughlin came and went like a seven-year cicada, leaving a dead shell and a larva in the tree of life to emerge and perpetuate the line after (thankfully) long intervals.  Luckily we can bear the nuisance every seven years or so at most.

Despite the apparently large, but certainly dated, popularity of Sheen's and Greeley's [work], the two are absolutely marginal by any measure— intuition, elevation, inspiration, entertainment, emotional appeal, self-examination, writing ability, artistry, poetic insight, philosophy, theology, ontology, psychology, mystery, you name it.  In fact, I've become very cynical about any people of their ilk whose appeal is to an American audience the vital needs of which they are incapable of addressing.

Those two are completely (and deservedly) unknown in the larger world in which I live. Would that we had a modern bishop capable of the actions, songs, writings and inspiration that people of an earlier confused period found in St. Ambrose.  

Because of poverty, disease, drugs, corrupt governments, and natural disasters, our controversies and comfortable Greeleyesque concerns are properly meaningless in countries like Korea, Vietnam, Senegal, Mali, India, Mauritania, Nepal, where life is stark, people are real, and self-indulgence or self pity are for the few who have power and time.

It has been humbling wherever I go to be a member of a vital church, whose people have intuitive faith that we [Americans] lack or suppress.  Our acquaintance with Mother Teresa; our involvement (together with the communist chief minister of West Bengal) with Calcutta's spastic children; our own band of lepers in Dakar whose bodies gradually lost extremities from month to month; the legless lady who cheerfully dragged herself through the Istanbul Bazaar and whose inspiring conversation required that I squat with her on the pavement; most recently, the Saigon slum hostel for children with AIDS and the children of dead AIDS parents; these are only a few examples of real people and a vibrant church in which the disabled and disadvantaged carry the rest of us unaware of our vital dependence on them.  Conversations with any of these people are incomparable and inspiring treasures. 

My church, the cathedral in Dubai across the street from a major mosque, hosts 4000 people at each of six masses every Sunday.

My church celebrates a rousing High Mass every Sunday at the cathedral in Dakar with the mixed choir singing the Missa de Angelis in robust, if poorly accented Latin.

My church is packed with people overflowing into the street in Praia, Cape Verde, where the parish priest berated the crowd for having children outside of marriage (the head of state was one of several children from one of several women and a former parish priest).

My church is Easter Sunday Mass in Georgetown, Guyana, during which 11 babies are baptized accompanied by mothers, but no known fathers.

My church in Trieste is where an operatic Italian priest and the dutiful congregation sang every word of the Mass.

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