Holy Name Church, Fall River, MA

It’s a quirk of New England and Rhode Island geography, crisscrossed by its many waterways that, while the seat of our own Diocese of Providence lies 30 miles away to our west and clear across Narragansett Bay, the Holy Name Parish in the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts is only half that distance, a mere 16 miles north of Portsmouth, as the crow flies. On Monday, December 4, I arrived at Holy Name School in Fall River, at the invitation of Fr. Riley J. Williams, Pastor and School Director. Fr. Riley has become a frequent visitor to our monastery after being directed our way by Daniel McDonough, the previous Head of School at Portsmouth, who subsequently offered them his assistance when they were in need of a math teacher. Fr. Riley avails himself for an occasional afternoon of peace and quiet in our monastic library and typically stays for Vespers and a meal with the monks before heading home across the state line. We both agreed that it was time for me to pay a visit to his school, church and rectory, so the invitation came to speak with an eighth-grade religion class about monasticism, specifically of a Benedictine charism. The teacher who greeted me was Vice Principal Robert Deschenes, who splits the subject of his course between religion and history.

As he led me into his classroom, I spotted a cardboard box near the door holding a number of copies of Fr. James J. Martin’s book, My Life with the Saints (Loyola Press, 2006). He is a well-known Jesuit author and, as it turns out, is a good friend-of-a-friend, the film and Broadway actor, Stephen McKinley Henderson. Several years ago, a school family sent me the book which I enjoyed very much, especially the chapter on Fr. Martin’s experience at Lourdes. I re-read it before my own pilgrimage to Lourdes last July with five Portsmouth students. What caught my eye that morning in Mr. Bob’s classroom was the cover illustration: ten full-length figures of saints in profile looking to the left. It is just one segment of the series of woven tapestries by the artist John Nava which he created for the new Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles. (A short art history lesson on their design and eventual creation by Flanders Tapestries in Belgium, part of the cathedral’s website, is worth reading.)

The formal dedication of the cathedral took place on September 2, 2002, with memories of the tragedy of September 11, 2001 still fresh in everyone’s hearts. Mr. Nava, while helping to unroll the tapestries upon their arrival from Belgium shortly after 9/11, said, “This is the time when you want to love humanity and see something that is really, truly uplifting and beautiful.” And that is exactly what I thought after seeing them for the first time in 2004 on a visit to LA. Taking as his models some of his own family members, people off the streets, and other “types” chosen by a Hollywood casting agent, he chose to depict them as everyday faces so that viewers would see them as “a saint that could look like me.” Of course, his images of Pope St. John XXIII and St. Teresa of Calcutta are based on photographs, but for the 17th century saint, Ignatius of Loyola, Nava researched portrait paintings and death mask images. Two weeks after being reminded of those saints on the book cover, I received a beautiful email with a Christmas meditation from Oblate Gerrie Beebe, whose writings never fail to inspire. Referring to St. Ignatius she wrote: “As he lay recuperating after being wounded in battle with only a book on the lives of the saints [italics are mine] and the Bible to read, St. Ignatius developed what’s known as the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, of which visualizing prayer is a main component.” Gerrie’s choice of words, in light of Fr. Martin’s book title, was providential. And it gets better. At the recent conference I attended in St. Louis of F.O.C.U.S. (the Fellowship of Catholic University Students), branded as SEEK24, one of the many speakers that week shared the very same story about St. Ignatius with the 20,000 participants in attendance. For many, I think, it was their first hearing of his choice of reading material during rehabilitation from a cannonball wound in his leg.

San José Sanchez del Rio banner at St. Peter’s

The morning with Mr. Bob’s 8th grade class in Fall River was time well-spent. We spoke of saints that day, of St. Benedict and others, and about how many saints are plain everyday people, young and old, as depicted on the cover of those books in their classroom. I’m convinced that every one of those attentive, questioning students has what it takes for sainthood. I thought of them again at SEEK24, exactly one month later, upon learning that the patron saint of the conference was a Mexican boy martyred at age 14. Canonized by Pope Francis on October 16, 2016, St. José Sanchez del Rio, is the patron saint of religious liberty. He is immortalized by his tortured death scream of “Viva, Cristo Rey!” which was emblazoned on the backs of thousands of t-shirts worn by SEEK24 students throughout the week in America’s Dome, students only a few years older, in some cases, than the teenaged St. Jose’. The large banner which fluttered on the façade of St. Peter’s in Rome at his canonization showed his holy haloed head and bloodied feet, his feet which had the soles cut off so that as he walked to his execution, he left bloodied footprints on the gravel road of the town. Trying to imagine man’s inhumanity to man, or to boy, makes it so difficult to even write this.