Path to Sainthood

The Khmer Rouge ruthlessly attacked the leaders of the Catholic Church and other religious leaders. The bishop at that time and eleven other church leaders have been proposed for canonization as modern martyrs for the faith. Pope Francis asked the present bishop, Bishop Olivier Schmitthaeusler, in 2015 to start the process and it has just now concluded and the evidence and documentation required has been sent to Rome.

Bishop Olivier, Apostolic Vicar of Phnom Penh, solemnly closed the diocesan inquiry for the beatification of the Presumed Martyrs of Cambodia: The Servants of God, Bishop Joseph Chhmar Salas and his 11 Companions. Here is his statement:

These Servants of God — bishop, priests, religious, and laity — gave heroic witness to Christ amid the Khmer Rouge communist genocide (1975–1979), a brutal regime that caused the deaths of an estimated 1.5 to 3 million Cambodians through execution, starvation, forced labor, and persecution of faith.

After 10+ years of work, nearly 2,500 pages of testimonies and documents — radiant signs of faith in the darkness — are sealed and will soon go to Rome.

Pray fervently that they may soon be recognized by the Universal Church as models of charity and martyrdom.

As Bishop Salas said before his exile and death:
“Speak of us to the world.”
50 years later, we still do.

Still settling in…

I moved to Nazareth Home at the end of August but I’m still not fully moved in. I still have papers to separate, some boxes to unload, and places that I need to find for various items. One on-going problem has been the bright afternoon sunlight coming into the living room/mostly office I’ve tried to create. Looking at computer monitors with a bright window beside them was tedious. Earlier I put up some curtains in my bedroom to block an extremely bright security light outside, and then today my sister Mary and her husband Mike helped me put up another set of curtains in the office. What a difference that makes!

Fratelli Tutti

A further reflection on immigration from Pope Francis’ encyclical, #44:

We forget that “there is no worse form of alienation than to feel uprooted, belonging to no one. A land will be fruitful, and its people bear fruit and give birth to the future, only to the extent that it can foster a sense of belonging among its members, create bonds of integration between generations and different communities, and avoid all that makes us insensitive to others and leads to further alienation”.

Desire

A central idea of the Buddha and his teaching is that desire is the root cause of human suffering. “From craving (desire) springs grief, from craving springs fear. For one who is free from craving, there is no grief and so no fear” is a quote attributed to Buddha.

He doesn’t say to want nothing but that suffering comes from coveting and attachment to things, and if we want peace, we must understand desire and the control it can produce over us.

A contemporary spiritual writer, Margaret Silf, offers a healthy understanding of desire:
We tend to think that if we desire something, it is probably something we ought not to want or to have. But think about it: without desire we would never get up in the morning. We would never have ventured beyond the front door. We would never have read a book or learned something new. No desire means no life, no growth, no change. Desire is what makes two people create a third person. Desire is what makes crocuses push up through the late-winter soil. Desire is energy, the energy of creativity, the energy of life itself. So let’s not be too hard on desire.