April 28, 2015
At home, we have a small TV on the counter next to the fridge. Most of the time I watch it to catch up on the day’s news, Sports Center, or re-runs of Top Gear while I am doing the dishes. Last night was different. For a long time my wife and I stood shoulder to shoulder in the corner of our kitchen watching rioting and looting in the streets of Baltimore.
Among the things that make Baltimore so painful for us to watch right now, and there are many, is simple proximity. The desperately poor neighborhoods seem right next door. Some of our students live in Baltimore zip codes. Some in our community know the location of the looted 7-Eleven and the burned out CVS.
There are, of course, many different points of view, many interpretations of what has been happening in our country in recent months. Years of frustrations, tensions, resentments, mistrust, and deprivation combine to tear at the fabric that holds a civil society together. Last night, one TV correspondent cited the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In a speech he delivered a few weeks before his assassination in 1968, he said:
It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.
While we deplore the lawlessness and destruction that we see, the events in Baltimore are a reminder that as a Catholic community, we are called to hear the cries of the poor and listen for the language of the unheard. More particularly, in the Fundamental Principles of the Xaverian Brothers we read:
It is through your life of gospel witness
lived in common with your brothers
that God desires to manifest
His care and compassionate love
to those who are separated and estranged,
not only from their neighbors,
but also from their own uniqueness;
to those who suffer from want, neglect, and injustice:
the poor, the weak, and the oppressed of this world.
One of the best things we do in the network of Xaverian Brothers Sponsored Schools is to guide our students to engagement with service in powerful ways: they are generous to numerous worthy causes; they get their hands dirty in helping those in need at SOME and Camden; they are present to the poor and marginalized in Appalachia and El Salvador.
Events like those in Baltimore and Ferguson remind us that “care and compassionate love” demand even more than giving, doing, and being with. As we pray for peace in our country and our world, we must not neglect the task of teaching our young people how to be advocates for systemic change that builds a more just and equitable society.