Philip the Deacon and Saint Nunzio Sulprizio

On Thursday night, May 5, I went to Mass in Dulce Nombre. Before Mass, I had a meeting with a few people to begin to form a committee to oversee a new project of workshops on trades for young people.

The Mass was to celebrate the feast of Saint Nunzio Sulprizio, who is remembered in one of the murals in a side chapel in the church. I also ended up preaching.

We used the readings of the Easter weekday. The first reading (Acts 8:26-40) was the encounter of Philip the deacon with the Ethiopian eunuch.

Philip was among the seven, chosen with Stephen, to serve the incipient Christian community in responding to the needs of the non-Jewish members who had felt that their orphans and widows were not sufficiently cared for. 

Other than Stephen, only the work of Philip is told in the Acts of the Apostles. He goes to a Samaritan city and is then called to accompany an Ethiopian official, returning home after a visit to Jerusalem. He reaches out to those on the margins, those rejected by the authorities – the Samaritans, an Ethiopian, a eunuch. And he brings them to faith.

The encounter of Philip and the Ethiopian is emblematic: Philip asks “Do you understand what you are reading?” The Ethiopian official responds, “How can I, unless someone instructs me?”

Who helps us understand the scripture? Who instructs us?

We cannot understand the scriptures alone. The scriptures are spoken to a people, and we need the people, the assembly, the church to help us understand. This does not mean that one person might not be the voice through which God gives us a newer, deeper, and broader understanding of His Word. 

In this passage, Philip as representative of the community helps the Ethiopian to understand the scriptures and to lead him to baptism.

In our days we also need the community to help us understand the scriptures and the call of God in our lives – in the liturgy, in the sacraments, and through others in the community, bishops, priests, deacons, religious, catechists, delegates.

But we also need the witness of the saints to help us understand the scriptures.

Saint Nunzio Sulprizio, whose died on May 5, 1936, can help us understand the mystery of suffering, the mystery reflected in the passage of Isaiah which the Ethiopian official was reading.

Barely 19 years old this young man had experienced much suffering in his short life. 

Orphaned as an infant, his grandmother raised him and nurtured him in the faith, She died when he was nine.

A brutal uncle took him in and had him work in his blacksmith shop. He treated him brutally, worked him cruelly, and hardly gave him enough to eat.

Nunzio developed gangrene in one of his legs and had to spend four months in a hospital. Another uncle found out about his nephew’s plight and took Nunzio to stay with a friend of his, a colonel who took care of Nunzio and provided him the medical care and the love he needed.

His uncle’s friend found a place for him in the hospital for the incurables in Naples. There he prepared for and received his first communion.

In the hospital Nunzio did not sit back and feel sorry for himself. He ended up evangelizing the others in his own way, preparing some children for their first communion.

His patient suffering and his care for other sick young people show us a way to respond to illness.

He was later found to have bone cancer which contributed to his death at an early age.

Meditating on his life, his patient disposition, and his life and death we can begin to understand even better the passage of Isaiah that the Ethiopian was reading:

Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and as a lamb before its shearer is silent, so he opened not his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him. 

Nunzio suffered not only the physical effects of gangrene and cancer, but also the emotional effects of being an orphan, of being abused and maltreated. 

How many young people suffer like him.

Saint Nunzio can help us understand how to live, how to face suffering, and how to die. He can also inspire us to work for and with the ill, the victims of violence and abuse, the young who are abandoned and abused. 

Saint Nunzio was canonized in October 2018, in the same Mass where Pope Francis canonized Monseñor Óscar Romero and Pope Paul VI (who had beatified Nunzio).

Violence, insurrection, Honduras

Lest anyone misunderstand what I am writing, I want to make it clear that I am a Christian pacifist, rooted in the witness of the early martyrs Marcellus and Maximilian, of Saint Martin of Tours, of Saint Francis of Assisi, and, in our days, Dorothy Day.

Lest anyone think that I believe in a passive pacifism, my heroes include Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and the many people who peacefully risked their lives in campaigns for justice and the poor throughout the world.

Lest anyone think I am a hypocrite, my evidence is that I am prone to impatience and anger and have a hard time forgiving others. (Call that hypocrisy, if you will.) For these and other sins that are at the root of violence and are still in my life, I beg God’s forgiveness and help to

Lest anyone think I speak from an ivory tower, they should know that I speak from a nice house in a village in Honduras, a country with a reputation for violence, trying to accompany the people as a deacon, a servant.  I also spent time accompanying people in El Salvador during and after their civil war.

I condemn all sorts of violence. But I have to say that the most pernicious violence that I see finds its roots in the structures of power, domination, and institutionalized violence, that many states use to consolidate their power and to protect the interests of the moneyed few.

I understand why people may resort to violence but I do not justify it. I understand it, partly with the help of the word f Pope Saint Paul VI, in Progresio Populorum – The Development of the Peoples (30-31):

30. There are certainly situations whose injustice cries to heaven. When whole populations destitute of necessities live in a state of dependence barring them from all initiative and responsibility, and all opportunity to advance culturally and share in social and political life, recourse to violence, as a means to right these wrongs to human dignity, is a grave temptation.
31. We know, however, that a revolutionary uprising--save where there is manifest, long-standing tyranny which would do great damage to fundamental personal rights and dangerous harm to the common good of the country--produces new injustices, throws more elements out of balance and brings on new disasters. A real evil should not be fought against at the cost of greater misery.

For this reason, I am disturbed about the recent meeting in La Ceiba, Atlántida, Honduras. of LIBRE, the opposition part formed after the 2009 coup.

As reported in Noti Bomba, Former president, Mel Zelaya, stated: ““Tenemos derecho a la violencia, a la guerra y a la insurrección”- “We have the right to violence, war, and insurrection.”

He has called before for a peaceful insurrection – and I have few reservations about that. I do believe, however, that this must be the initiative of the people and not of political leaders and needs to be the fruit of grass-roots efforts of organizing and solidarity.

But I fear that Honduras is suffering from efforts of the elite to control the people and use them for their gain.

For me, it is obvious that the party in power, the National Party, is expert at this. Their consolidation of power in the three branches of government, their use of government jobs and services to assure (to buy off) their power base, their demonization of their foes, the massive militarization are way they “instrumentalize” their supporters, using them as pawns to maintain their party in power. And I won’t detail the variety of attacks on human rights supporters, environmental activists, and opposition journalists – including deaths – that have happened during their years in power.

But to call for insurrection, without facilitating the development of a critical consciousness in the people, can be another way for political parties to “use” their supporters. It can also be a way of putting them in danger for their lives.

What then?

Gandhi started with purifying and strengthening the people in the villages. Martin Luther King worked in the light of years of organizing and consciousness raising in the African-American communities.

Central to Gandhi’s protests was the constructive program, the efforts at the village level to make changes. This is empowerment from the base.

But what is also needed is a voice from the church that speaks from the side of the poor, that speaks clearly against all the forces that degrade the other, that resists all forms of violence while placing itself against all the forces of injustice.

In 1948, Albert Camus spoke to a group of Dominicans in France. When I first read his words when I was in college during the Vietnam War, they challenged me and I pray that they may still challenge me:

“What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear, and that they should voice their condemnation in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest [person]. That they should get away from abstraction and confront the blood-stained face history has taken on today.”

And thus I reject all violence as I will try, in many small ways, to do what I can. As Camus said in the same speech:

“Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.”

-----
The photo is not of Honduras, but of Bethlehem from a house in a Palestinian refugee camp that had been blown up by Israeli forces about December 1, 2004.

A deacon at Romero's canonization

Last month Padre German Navarro, my pastor and I went to Rome for the canonization of Monseñor Romero and others. Padre German has a very deep devotion to Saint Óscar Romero.

Through the help of a friend in Rome I found out a way to get a ticket for him to concelebrate and mentioned in the e-mail that I was a deacon. I got a message back in Italian that told me to go on the Saturday morning before the canonization to the Vatican liturgy office to get the tickets. I went and stood in line for two hours.

On Sunday morning, we lined up to get in. One of the providential moments while waiting was seeing Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, the Argentinian human rights advocate, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, and director for some years of SERPAJ, Servicio Paz y Justicia. I had met him when he was on a speaking tour in Iowa.

with Adolfo Pérez Esquivel

But Padre German and I waited a few minutes longer before going through security.

When we entered St. Peter’s square, I tried to follow him but was ushered to another site, inside St. Peter’s Basilica. In the chapel which holds the tomb of Saint John Chrysostom, there were close to a hundred deacons. A few were young transitional deacons but I saw a large groups of older men.

Permanent deacons from the diocese of Brescia

There were about thirty from Brescia, the diocese in which Pope Paul VI grew up and where he was ordained. Interestingly, Pope Paul VI was responsible for implementing the recommendation of the Second Vatican Council to restore the diaconate as a permanent order and allow the ordination of married men. (Pope Paul VI released a motu propio to restore the permanent diaconate on June 18, 1967.)

We vested but didn’t use our own stoles. We were given identical stoles, which were priestly stoles that we wore in the diaconal style with the help of a safety pin.

We were told, in Italian, that we would distribute the consecrated bread and wine to the priests. I couldn’t understand the details of how we would do this but decided that “watch and follow” might work. It did.

We were escorted to sit in chairs by the colonnades of St. Peter’s to the left of the Pope’s throne.

At the offertory we were given a ciborium and a chalice with wine and went to stand to the right of the pope at the altar. There we stood as the pope, bishops, and priests recited the words of consecration. For me it was a moving experience, realizing that what I held in my hands was transformed from mere bread and wine into Christ’s Body and Blood. It was a humbling experience.

We were led to where the thousand or so priests were sitting and held the sacred vessels while the priests took the Body and Blood of Christ, most receiving by intinction.

After we were finished, we were directed inside St. Peter’s Basilica to receive communion and to put the chalices and ciboria in the Blessed Sacrament chapel.

Afterwards, we went out for the end of Mass. While waiting to leave, I got this picture of Pope Francis.

What did we deacons do at the Mass?

I thought we just had a good spot to participate in the Mass, but we had work to do – to serve. Which is what we’re here for.

And it was a privilege to serve at the Mass for the canonization of seven holy people, including Monseñor Romero, Pope Paul VI, Mother Nazaria who worked in South America, and Nunzio Sulprizio, a nineteen-year old Italian.

His story touched me. Orphaned at an early age, he was taken in by an uncle who worked him hard and mistreated him. When Saint Nunzio got ill, his uncle turned him out of the house. Another uncle took him in and arranged a way for him to get medical care. Dying, he assisted other sick and maintained a deep sense of God's presence.

He is a good saint for many young people here - orphaned or left with a single mother, hardworking, mistreated, ill, but keeping faith. I need to learn more about him. 

We deacons sat under his banner - maybe that's another message for me as I continue to try to serve here in Honduras.