Saint Rita the Wounded

Saint Rita, whose feast is today, is sometimes known as the patron saint of lost and impossible causes. Married at a young age against her will to a terrible, abusive husband, by her prayers she gradually reformed him into a proper Christian husband.

After his murder, she entered the convent.

This wounded saint received the marks of Christ’s thorny wounds upon her forehead.

Over the years I have been personally associated with two institutions bearing her name. In those two places, I have experienced the best and the worst of people in the Church.

At Saint Rita High School, there were teachers who taught me how to think, who pointed me towards a life-long love of literature and history, who honed my curiosity and who helped build what strength of character I have.

And yet, there were others who drove me away from considering the Catholic Church or even taking her beliefs seriously. My freshman moral Theology teacher sexually abused some of my classmates and was later thrown out of the Augustinian Order and (eventually) stripped of ministry.

The Devil prowls through Catholic Schools, because their mission is to form the men and women who will fight him.

Thirty years later, having in the interim finally fallen in love with Christ and entered His Church, I landed at Saint Rita Parish with my beautiful bride Francine.

The pastor was a truly holy man, and he challenged his people to holiness. He pulled no punches in his homilies. He taught the Catechism. There was a minimum of nonsense in the parish liturgy. He led his people by example in the works of mercy.

Many of the people of the parish were likewise good and faithful Catholics. There are many who I remember with love.

But the pastor retired, and the parish council, my brothers and sisters in Christ, broke my heart. Even so, I forgive them, for I love them all. I pray they will forgive me for whatever offenses I have given them.

Let me explain, as briefly as I can and as completely as I dare.

Just over a year ago, while setting up for a Sodality bake sale in the Parish Hall, my wife was suddenly and without provocation verbally assaulted and physically threatened by a parishioner. In front of several witnesses, this person screamed that Francine was “the Devil” and intimated that Francine had an unsavoury relationship with our pastor, a man of over 80 years. Can you imagine?

Subsequent to the initial attack, this person prosecuted a campaign of continued harassment, including letters through the U.S. post, stalking, ferreting out a pseudonymous blog kept by my wife, sending out-of-context articles of same to members of the parish seeking to scandalize them, and telephoning our former parish of Saint Patrick to ask the bewildered staff there if we were “troublemakers”.

She even started a whispering campaign that my wife was a witch. A witch! What is this, the sixteenth century? Doesn’t she realize that no self-respecting witch would volunteer for Christian ministry?

We were repeatedly told that this person was mentally unwell and that the situation was being taken care of. Finally, however, the Parish Council voted to remove both my wife and myself from any ministry within the parish. We were informed by the new pastor who claimed he had no choice but to obey the wishes of the Council.

We were not told what, if any, charges were brought against us, nor by whom. Nor were we given an opportunity to defend ourselves.

Now I’m no canon lawyer, and I’m unclear on the competence of a parish council to conduct a secret judicial hearing and impose their will on a pastor of the Church, leaving him only to execute their verdict. Under Canon Law, the competence of these councils would seem to be restricted to providing a pastor with “advice and assistance” (Canon 228 §2).

Even if this tribunal were legal, it certainly seems that these grave defects in procedure violate our rights under Canon 1507 of the Code of Canon Law, which provides that a court “must call or summon the other parties to court to effect the joinder of the issue”. Furthermore, given that no summons were lawfully communicated, Canon 1511 provides that “the acts of the process are null.”

Leaving the law aside, this entire procedure flies in the face of Christ’s admonition in the Gospel to directly confront those who sin against you (Matt. 18:15-17).

We could have fought this, I’m sure, but I had other considerations to take into account. My sacred duty as Francine’s husband is to do everything in my power to see that she attains heaven. Given that she no longer felt safe in her own parish, and that past assurances of “fixing” the situation had only heaped punishment and scorn on the victim of an assault, we left. We were not alone in doing so.

There are good and holy people at Saint Rita striving to do Christ’s will. I pray that they will exert themselves over the few bad apples and reform their parish.

For the Devil prowls about such places, seeking the ruin of souls.