43: The light shines in the darkness

Episode 43: Speaking from America, Judy shares honestly how she has moved from saying the rosary in childhood, through working for social justice and peace, to finding regular Mass attendance 'really hard' because of the marginalisation of women in the church. She describes living in the midst of brutal US political upheaval, as 'horrifying' yet she still finds hope in the Gospel and in other people. 

Find out more

Pax Christi USA

Maryknoll Lay Missioners

Knights of Columbus

Knights of St Columba!

A new episode, a different conversation, every Wednesday!
Email me: theresa@KindsofCatholic.co.uk
Facebook, Instagram and X/Twitter Give me a follow @KindsofCatholic
Find the transcript: https://kindsofcatholic.buzzsprout.com

Music: Greenleaves from Audionautix.com

Transcript

 You're listening to All Kinds of Catholic with me, Theresa Alessandro. My conversations with different Catholics will give you glimpses into some of the ways, we're living our faith today. Pope Francis has used the image of a caravan. A diverse group of people travelling together, on a sometimes chaotic journey together. That's an image that has helped to shape this podcast. I hope you'll feel encouraged and affirmed, and maybe challenged at times. I am too in these conversations.

So listeners, thanks for joining the episode today. I'm joined by a guest from America and Judy and I are gonna have a good conversation about Judy's faith and what motivates her and her faith. I guess we'll cover what it's like being a Catholic in America generally and also in particular at this time. So let's see where the Holy Spirit takes us. Welcome, Judy. 

Thank you. Thank you, Theresa. It's nice to be here.

So, Judy, may we start at the beginning a little bit? Have you always been a Catholic? Were you brought up in a Catholic household? 

Yes. So I was born into a Catholic family, several generations Catholic, very proudly Catholic.  So my last name is Coode, which is an old English name. The first person with that name who came from England in the early 1600s, he settled in Maryland, which was traditionally the Catholic colony. And in the meantime my mother's side of the family were both English and Irish. They arrived here in the 1800s. When I was born, I am the youngest of nine children. My mother and father were both active practising Catholics. We are from Tennessee. Tennessee isn't the Deep South, but it is the South and the South has a smaller Catholic population than other places and actually has had a history of some discrimination against Catholics. I'm from Nashville, Tennessee. When I was growing up the Catholic population in the state was maybe honestly about 1%. The Catholics just kept to each other. It was a very close community. We went to Catholic schools and everyone we interacted with was Catholic. We had a Catholic dentist, Catholic doctor, you had a Catholic lawyer, you went to a Catholic car mechanic. So we operated in a very close knit little network. My father was in a fraternal group called the Knights of Columbus, which is a distinctly US group for Catholic men, and it was a response to anti Catholic - it was meant to be, like, a patriotic Catholic men's group to show that Catholic men could be patriotic.

 Just a little note for listeners, the Knights of Columbus in America is not the same as the Knights of Saint Columba here in The UK. I made that mistake too.

He loved being in the Knights of Columbus. You know they had a bowling league and did some charity work together. My mother also did some charity work. We grew up saying the rosary, saying our prayers, grace before dinner. So I just swam in it. It was my total universe. I went all the way through high school, secondary school in Nashville and then I went to university. I went to Loyola University in New Orleans which is a Jesuit school. 

Your faith at that time, Judy, were you all into it, all the way through university? 

And and I really didn't question. It was just in my DNA. Of course, I'm Catholic.  It was innate and intrinsic. It was just part of me, and I couldn't imagine not being. Going to Loyola was a change because, of course, it was the Jesuits. That was my introduction to the more social justice components of the church teachings - that had not ever been taught to me before. The social analysis or liberation theology or anything - that was all brand new to me and that really resonated with me. I did a volunteer year after university. I was with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. That again that was another year steeped in Catholicism. And then I came here to Washington DC so that was 35 ago. I came here to do a year with Sojourners magazine. So Sojourners is a progressive Christian non-denominational social justice publication. That was really an intro for me to a broader Christian community. I just had not interacted that often with Christians who weren't Catholics. It was revelatory and it was really good for me and I have always been grateful for that connection to Sojourners. I got a job with Maryknoll which is a Catholic missionary organisation. It does a lot of work on justice and peace issues because the office that I worked at here in Washington, we stayed in touch with missioners on the ground who were in a number of Latin American countries, African countries, Asian countries. And we would respond to their lived experiences, the people with whom they were living, who were being affected by US foreign policy. And we would try to educate and help people advocate on justice issues connected to those countries and around that US foreign policy. Got to know some amazing missionaries who were really devoted people doing great work, very brave, very clear headed, faith-filled people. Simultaneously, I had become involved with Pax Christi. I was invited to join a Pax Christi young adult group. So I was with that group for a few years and it was a prayer group. They became my friends and we did things together and of course in Washington DC there's ample opportunity for public witnesses and demonstrations and actions like that so we would participate in those things and I just stayed involved with Pax Christi. I was on the National Council. 2015, I had been with Maryknoll for twenty years. I just decided twenty years was enough, and so I left the job at Maryknoll and I immediately started volunteering with Pax Christi International in Brussels. I got hired with what became the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative. I did that for six years and then I started this role with Pax Christi USA. So I have been up to my eyeballs in the Catholic world most of my life. 

And just for people who don't know, Judy, would you just tell us what Pax Christi is?

 So Pax Christi was started eighty years ago this month. It was founded by a French woman. Martha Dortel-Claudot had felt very called to praying for and working for reconciliation with the German population, I think particularly German Catholics. She felt that French Catholics and German Catholics should reconcile. They started Pax Christi and it was a project of reconciliation. It spread around Western Europe. Pax Christi USA was created in 1972. It's a membership organisation to promote peace and reconciliation. 

Thank you. You've obviously worked in environments to do with peace and social justice from a Catholic perspective for most of your life, as you say, and so your faith practice is very closely bound up with your work. Are you able to separate them and think what your faith actually looks like? What is it that nourishes your faith, or is it doing the work that nourishes your faith in itself? 

Definitely the work nourishes my faith. What I have often thought and I still think this, is that I don't know how people do it without a faith. I know that there are plenty of people who are agnostic or atheist who do justice and peace work, and it's fascinating to me that they do it without a faith component. No disrespect to them. That's just fascinating to me because I just think it's constitutive of faith to do this. I'm shocked on the other end. I'm shocked that people who claim to be Christian or claim to be faith-filled who aren't interested in justice and peace - because that does not compute. How can you say all these things about your own faith and then you don't you don't do anything about Justice and Peace work? I think for me personally I believe there's a higher power. I believe there's some life force that has created everything out of love. I think that there is a connection amongst all life. I believe that Jesus lived and walked. And did he do miracles? Sure. Did his mother go bodily to heaven? What, whatever. I mean, okay. I just I don't lose sleep over that stuff. I do think the formal reception of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire was a mistake.

That power is too tied up in it, you mean? 

Yeah. That's why we have a lot of dangerous stuff going on in the name of Christianity these days. I don't feel compelled to attend Mass every week, honestly. It happened sort of a while ago, and it's pretty solidified. I'm pretty turned off by the Catholic Church's refusal to allow women full leadership roles and it makes it really hard to sit through services. Certainly, the church here in the United States, all over the world, has done profound damage to children and vulnerable people, and it's part of the power thing. Men who have been formed in seminaries have been told that they are special and they can do whatever they want. It's a lot of pain and damage. A lot of harm has been done. The church of the United States has just been reeling, honestly. It's just heartbreaking and it's all their own fault. They did it to themselves. They allowed this to go on far too long, and now we're all paying the price, not me. People who need the services from the church, they're not being served because all that money's just going out to settle court cases. It's awful. 

I do think there's something where we are all harmed. People who are victims of that abuse are most seriously harmed, but we are all harmed by the church that we want there to be, that we want to belong to. It doesn't look the way it should. And it does harm us, doesn't it? It's led to you feeling not comfortable at Mass, the source and summit of our faith. I'd like to ask you a bit more about women in the church actually because some listeners will be thinking, Oh, not this again, and some listeners will be thinking, Yes, please talk about this. So let us talk about that a little more. I'll tell you, just to set the scene, where I am with it. When I was a young adult, I never questioned that women weren't in positions of ministry in the church. I never questioned it. I know some wonderful, wonderful priests and I deeply appreciated them, and it just seemed to me that that's the way things are. When I changed my mind was when Pope John Paul died, I was just thinking about this the other day with Pope Francis being so ill. When Pope John Paul died, John Paul the second, I was taking a class in something or another and the news broke in the morning and when I went to this class a woman said to me, I'm really sorry to hear that Pope John Paul died. I'm not a Catholic but, you know, I thought he was a lovely man. This is a sad time. And I said, Oh, thank you. You know, I don't know how she knew I was a Catholic. I must have said something. Quite moved that she thought to say something to me. You know, it was nice. And then I thought, I'll watch his funeral on TV. I thought Pope John Paul was wonderful. I sat on the sofa and put the telly on, and the funeral service began, and there were just rows and rows and rows and rows of cardinals sitting there, and all the men up on the sanctuary there getting ready for the funeral service. It was, you know, like a picture tells a thousand words. I just suddenly thought, they're all men. There's me having this conversation with this woman. It was so nice. I'm not represented here. This is just a men thing now. It just reached me in a way that existing in the culture had not, and I have not been the same since. And I really do think with you, this is a problem. 

Yeah. I similarly, I just never questioned it. Personally I never had a call, so it never even occurred to me. When I was in college, there was a campus minister, a woman, she was the first person who used female language for God and that struck me and, well, wait, if God can be female. Another thing was, I spent a year with Sojourners. Of course, like I said, it's nondenominational and they had women in leadership roles. There was a group I was in and we decided to do an Easter meal. It was gonna be the night before Easter and each one of us we spent Lent doing this. It was a Lenten practice. We were each gonna represent someone from the New Testament, someone who would have known Jesus. At this dinner the night before Easter, we were gonna be our person. We were gonna play a role and speak as if the day before had been the day of Jesus's execution and Jesus hasn't risen yet and we were speaking as someone a follower of Jesus, a friend of Jesus who has had this loss. We did a lot of study. We all got books out of the library like theology books, studies of the New Testament. I was Mary Magdalene and just reading about, you know, the theories about her. A theory that I read was she was really a leader. The reason why we ended up with this image of her as being a prostitute actually came out of the power struggle she had with Peter and with Paul. And they won. The men won. And they created the persona of her to keep her down, to dismiss her and marginalise her. And that resonated for like, Oh, yeah. I can totally see that happening. And I have friends now, women who do sincerely feel called and have felt so bereft. The church that they love isn't welcoming them in their gift. The male only priesthood just, there's absolutely no defence for it. I do have to say on the other hand, I am often really moved by ritual. That's one thing we do really well. And I hear you about seeing like rows and rows and rows of cardinals and on the other hand I have found it moving. I've been to a couple of funerals for instance for Jesuit priests. All the other Jesuits in his province concelebrate and I find that very moving to see them all together even though they are all men. We just had last week Cardinal McElroy was installed as the Archbishop of Washington DC. I went to the installation Mass. Every single priest in the diocese, they were all invited. It took fifteen or twenty minutes for all of these men to process in. On the one hand, you've gotta be kidding, all of these men. But on the other hand, I know several of them. It was a celebration for them. I can still be very touched by by the ritual.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you said that, Judy. I think that's right. There's something in me, you know, I don't normally talk to - well, I don't think I've ever spoken to an actual priest about what I think about them all being men because I value those priests. So I do, and I don't wanna take anything away from their amazing service. I feel a bit disloyal on the one hand, feeling that this isn't right. And like you say, it's not to say that there isn't something really wonderful about seeing that community gathered. The same for me when we have a big celebration with lots and lots and lots of priests, there's something very affirming and wonderful about it. But, you know, if I really sit down and think about it, I think, yeah, however, it's half the story.

Right. 

On a different tack, what is it like at the moment in Pax Christi USA in America? From over here where I'm sitting, it looks like a grim place to be. 

Yeah. Grim is a good word for it. As Catholics, it's pretty depressing. The Bishops Conference probably as in a lot of places, has skewed conservative. They will come out sometimes and say, you know, the right thing about some issues around war or economic justice. They're a lot louder on abortion or same sex marriage. And now, of course, it's transgender issues. They yell about those, but they whisper about other things. And that's always been pretty frustrating. I do think with the threats from the current administration particularly toward migrants, the Bishops Conference has been deeply damaged by this because what the administration has done is they've cancelled all this work on migration and refugee services. And that's a huge hit to the US Catholic Bishops because they received a big, big chunk of money to maintain those programs across the country. The Catholic Church was one of the major providers of migration and refugee and asylum services. They're closing offices. They've laid off people who have worked there for years. It's sickening and heartbreaking. We do have a few brave bishops who were outspoken about all this. So there's a little hope that the bishops will be able to push back a bit. It's just shocking what's going on, Theresa. It's shocking the damage that's being done so fast. I'm not kidding. I'll run into somebody or I'll talk to a friend and all we can talk about is how is this happening? No one's doing anything. Members of Congress are supposed to step in. Something needs to be done like our Supreme Court needs to be stepping in. But see the Supreme Court six months ago said that the president cannot, whatever the president does is legal so he can do whatever he wants. So he's, Trump is just running with it. They told him he can do anything he wants and so he is. It's really horrifying. This is a really big country. It's 300 million people, and I bet 280 million people, they're not paying attention to the details because at this moment, it's not really affecting them yet. But we're all gonna lose like, they're gonna cut Social Security, which is our program for retired people and people with disabilities that is being dismantled. They're killing our Department of Education and it's going to really hurt people who have children with disabilities. And I'm thinking I have a nephew, he and his wife have two children who have special needs. And what I have found really scary is a couple weeks ago, in our military has the JAG Corps which is the attorneys general and those are lawyers who interpret the constitution and are the brakes, you know, they're the ones who say No actually we can't do this because it's illegal. And Trump fired all of them and he's replacing them with people who are loyal to him who are going to tell him anything he does is okay. And that to me, we're gonna have martial law. You know, they're already starting to disappear people. You know about Mahmoud Khalil. I think that's gotten international attention. I mean, we know he's in Louisiana but they won't let him talk to his lawyers. It's frightening. 

And it is horrible. Horrible isn't the right word. Immoral, I think, to see how people who already are marginalised, who already are vulnerable, are just being cut away from whatever it is that the goal is, making more money for a few people. I don't even know if it's coherent.

That's exactly what it is. It's just making more money for a handful of people.

How does it feel in Pax Christi USA and how are you responding to these times?

Pax Christi USA, we have a lot of internal conversations. We have issued a couple of statements but what we can do is encourage people to make connections on their local level. What's going to be effective is to stay in touch with your community and figure out how to respond locally. An example is in Little Rock, Arkansas. There's a Pax Christi group. Their member of Congress, he won't take meetings. He won't listen to his constituents. And so Pax Christi Little Rock organized a public witness outside his office. They're getting hundreds of people to show up every week. 

I follow a little bit. I'm not up against all the detail. It's good to hear from somebody who's actually living with it. I wondered if we might talk about the Jubilee Year, but, you know, I often am talking with guests at the moment about Pilgrims of Hope, the Jubilee Year. What are you going to do? I don't think it washes for you, from the way you're talking. I don't know if you -  if it's even appropriate to put aside some time to think about a Jubilee except for, I suppose, the proper understanding of a Jubilee year, a resetting of economic justice, which seems like a gargantuan task just now for America.

Charlene Howard is the executive director of Pax Christi and she's a great champion of hope. She is really reminding us to hold tight to prayer and to hold tight to hope. She just affirms that the work that we do is necessary. It just affirms God's existence and the desire to do good. I mean, I'm grateful she's embracing the role of trying to help us all move forward and not lose faith to stay strong.

Maybe it will lift us out of this gloom; I sometimes ask people if there's scripture that stays with them, a little piece of something that, you know, is their watchword. Is there something for you that has always been or maybe more so now is something that is supporting you? 

The scripture that I've always embraced is ‘The light shines in the darkness and the darkness shall not overcome it’. Because there are a lot of lights out there. People are gonna keep showing up and taking care of each other and resisting and praying, and those are all lights and the darkness shall not overcome it. So that's what I cling to. It's from John. 

That's great and very fitting at this time. I'm really grateful for your time, Judy. Obviously, you've got a big job there that you're working on and I know listeners will be really interested to hear directly from someone in America about what it's like being a Catholic there and how things are for you at this time. Thanks ever so much for making some time to talk and to share what you think, and it's been really interesting.

Thank you, Theresa. I really appreciate the invitation. It was really fun to talk with you. I'm sorry it got depressing, but I'm grateful for the ear. 

Good. 

Thanks so much for joining me on All Kinds of Catholic this time. I hope today's conversation has resonated with you. A new episode is released each Wednesday. Follow All Kinds of Catholic on the usual podcast platforms. Rate and review to help others find it. And follow our X, Twitter, and Facebook accounts @kindsofCatholic. You can comment on episodes and be part of the dialogue there. You can also text me if you're listening to the podcast on your phone, although I won't be able to reply to those texts. Until the next time.