Catholicism online: Eastern church, writer O'Connor and Portland procession

Recent online articles call Catholics to reject “fake news,” remember the Eastern Church, revisit the unsettling faithfulness of writer Flannery O’Connor and recognize the Archdiocese of Portland’s Corpus Christi procession.

In remarks to the Holy See’s humanitarian program for Eastern churches, Pope Leo IVX issued a warning that “fake news,” inspired by “emotional manipulation and rhetoric,” sometimes fosters violent conflicts. In a piece published in America on June 26, Leo advised Christians to consider the real causes of such conflict.

“First and foremost, we really need to pray. It is up to us to make every tragic news story,  every newsreel that we see, a cry of intercession before God,” he said. “And then to offer help, just as you do and as many others can do through you.”

Leo called for Western Catholics to meet their Eastern counterparts from Ukraine, Turkey, Syria, the Holy Land, Iran and Eritrea. Forced migration has made them next-door neighbors, he said. The church in the West needs reminding of Eastern Catholics’ “sense of the sacred, their deep faith, confirmed by suffering, and their spirituality, redolent of the divine mysteries,” he said.

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Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, 100 years ago on the Solemnity of the Annunciation. Her essays, letters, journal entries and fiction, often misunderstood by some of her readers, have held essential truth for many others. While violence runs through some of her work, so does her sense of humor and her affinity for the natural world. 

Lorraine V. Murray, a columnist for The Georgia Bulletin, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Atlanta, wrote a piece for the March 25 National Catholic Register that celebrates O’Connor’s work. 

“In Revelation, a smug farmer’s wife awakens to her sins of racism and cruelty after a college girl hits her with a book and brands her a ‘warthog from hell,’" Murray wrote. "In her story The Displaced Person, a peacock surprises a priest by unfurling its tail feathers, and the man exclaims, ‘Christ will come like that!’”

O’Connor suffered from lupus – her father had died from the disease –  and endured significant pain from its symptoms and treatment. She wrote that sickness was a state, “where there’s no company, where no one can follow.”

Murray writes of O’Connor: “Her faith shown through when she said, “I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.’ Accepting God’s will for her life with equanimity, she wrote, ‘It is better to pray than to grieve; and it is greater to be joyful than to grieve.” 

O’Connor died in 1964 at age 39. She was awarded the National Book Award posthumously in 1972.

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An estimated 3,000 people processed through Northwest Portland on Sunday, June 22, to celebrate the Eucharist in observance of the feast of Corpus Christi.

Archbishop Alexander Sample led the procession around 21 blocks of Northwest Portland, from the Cathedral at Couch Street and 18th Avenue, continuing to Flanders Street, along Eleventh Avenue to Couch and back to the Cathedral. 

Christian Cristobal, marketing and communications coordinator for the archdiocese, wrote in a June 24 piece for Catholic News Agency, that “20 priests, eight deacons, over 100 altar servers and seminarians, 50 religious brothers and sisters, the Knights of Columbus, and the Knights and Ladies of the Holy Sepulcher took part.” 

Sample was pleased by the Eucharistic procession and the diversity of its participants. “The Eucharist has to be at the forefront and center of evangelization and mission renewal,” he said. “To see you all here today fills my heart with hope for the future,” he said.

“So many people see the Pacific Northwest as a center of darkness. I wish they could see this. I wish the Church across the United States could see this. I wish Pope Leo could see this.”