Excommunication is an Award

Fr. Roy Bourgeois, Maryknoll Priest, Founder of SOA Watch

Quite a few of the alphabet crowd of protesters, reformers, changers of church, are pouring out their horror at the threatened excommunication of Fr. Roy Bourgeois. And I can't understand why.

It is not a terrible thing to be excommunicated by the high priests of Rome. It is an Award. A recognition of the work of one who lives the Gospel. A canonization in a lifetime of one who actually, step by step, walks with Jesus.

Let excommunication happen. It is glorious. The highest award that the Vatican can bestow.

Excommunication? Of course. Par for the course. Coarse.

All tyrants scream when challenged by the little people, "Off with his head!" And trundle on secure within their walls in a far-off territory, remote, distant, irrelevant, obsolete, and oh! so riddled with mediocrity, the tawdry kind. "Mean-spirited and lacking in human decency," as the Encarta Dictionary reminds us. That's Rome.

The little person is Father Roy Bourgeois, a Maryknoll priest whose life's work is dedicated to challenging real tyrants, the ones who teach others to murder and rape and take over countries for militarism and, thus,  power. Ah! Power, that most magnificent goal to be seized, decidedly more pleasurable than gluttony, more invaluable than money, far more alluring than orgasm.

Power is the truth of all truths, as history indeed tells us over and over again. Power. It grants the freedom to strike preemptively, to rape and plunder and debauch and kill, kill, kill, kill, for its lust-driven obsession is to control the little people by manipulating that instinctive fear of death, the only escape. From power. Power. Absolute Power is all evil in and of itself, not merely its root.

But when Rome excommunicates in our times, no one fears or moans. Whatever happened to interdicts? They brought whole kingdoms to heel. Overnight. Excommunication is uproariously comical, a relief from the daily splurge of news of slaughter and mayhem and terrorism, the hallmarks of the heights to which our modern civilization has reached.

The whole world roars in the laughter of relief at the silly folly of gowned men hiding in the smallest city-state of the planet, without guns, who peek out and point the finger at yet another public person sinning by ignoring their edicts. They cringe at a little person preaching at the ordination of a woman priest, see in him a harbinger, in the simple and full sense of the word: a forerunner who announces the approach of someone named Jesus. Did you notice that nobody else at that ordination is being threatened with excommunication?

What then did Father Roy do to incur the wrath of Rome? Laurie Goodstein, writing in The New York Times for November 14, 2008, wrote:

In August, Father Bourgeois joined a ceremony in a Unitarian Universalist church in Lexington, Ky., in which a friend from the peace movement, Janice Sevre-Duszynska, claimed ordination as a Roman Catholic priest. Father Bourgeois gave the homily and laid hands on her.

The Rev. Roy Bourgeois, left, at an ordination ceremony for Janice Sevre-Duszynska, far right, in Lexington, Ky. The Vatican does not recognize such ceremonies and considers them invalid.

Father Roy is a man of peace, like his God. And, therefore, he cannot be allowed to be  a member of the Roman Catholic Church, the last preserve of authentic tyrants, fondling their most prized possession, a thing called "Absolute Power" – where there actually is none at all.

Ruling by written and oral statements alone, known to the law as Ipse Dixit, curial cardinals and their train of bishops have gathered unto themselves the baubles of the world they claim to despise and continue their  abuse of the little people, children, women, and men like Father Roy who dare to stand and speak truth to them.

Little wonder they rant in excommunication or interdict. That's all they've got. They have lost respect, because they have none for either their people or themselves. They lust for one thing alone. Power. Well, power and money and sex and food and drink and collecting treasure, while they pretend to be celibate and single and destitute in a poverty of sorts. They are deficient in decency, too.

Story?  Big bully gets a knee in his belly during a close game on the playground. Scared out of his wits that someone is challenging his power, he swings wildly, blindly, rants, stomps his feet, bellows his breath, grabs his ball and storms on home, screaming, "I excommunicate you."  The other kids laugh.

Another story? For those in Rome who think they have any power at all, unmindful of the new saying, "When respect for authority is washed away, power drains."

A king, uneasy on his throne, once the little people stopped cheering as he swept on by in his Kingmobile, gathered unto him his ministers out of the cave called "Curia" and bespoke: "How come we ain't got no respect anymore, huh?"

A dicasteral dean ventured, "We don't burn at the stake now."

His sycophant, a mere archbishop, murmured, "Oh! For the days when we got rid of the Cathars."

A bishop on the move upwards laughed, "Ah! That was an excommunication, it was. Took 'em all, heretic and faithful alike."

"Yah," one silent, tiny murmur of objection from a mere monsignor aware he'd never make the purple, "they said God could weed out the good from the bad. Thought they were doing the people a favor by sending them into eternity  early."

One obviously regal individual, known as the Black King, rose, acknowledged the silent hush which awaited his wisdom, age and grace before men, and began, "May it please the Curia, it might behoove this institution to lay down its mace of power and mingle."

"Mingle?" The scream came from a thousand mouths bellowing shock and awe at such a defamation of dogma, doctrine and discipline. "With them? The dregs of our one and holy and apostolic and catholic institution? Mingle with the laity?

"No way," whispered a bent-over slave, one of the lay little people, picking up empty glasses, sweeping cigar ash from the granite floor, avoiding jeweled slippers shodding tender soles, "No way, José." A poet nonetheless, one who sees beneath glitter.

In the sudden calm that always floods when realization of truth is about to happen, the man in Black spoke up again, "May I suggest that our King doff white regalia, don mufti, go out in the streets in disguise, unprotected save for one cardinal, sworded, lest assassination ruin the very last attempt to hang onto what you folk think we got: respect for your authority and its twin, power, the only brand of power worthy of its name, the Absolute One."

The crowd of the imperious ones began to mumble. The Man in Black held out both hands for silence and for attention. He resumed, "Out there, he can mingle with the people. They will not know who he be and will not bow down before him, dressed, walking, talking, acting like one of the little ones from out the herd of the ordinary. And he will hear truth. All he has to do is ask this simple question. Who is the most important person in this kingdom?"

The chorus awoke and chanted, "Let it be done." One wag used Latin, "Fiat." A political climber-upper yelled, "Yes, we can."

And off went the King with his sidekick the Inquisitor, armed with the silver sword of penance. Just outside the Vatican's walls they saw their first victim, a little old lady, festooned with rosary beads, humming a hymn.  The august one stopped her, "Madame, who is the greatest person in this kingdom?"

Startled though she was at this terror, she was also keen, "Why, I'd say he was the Secretary of State."

"Off with her head," roared the king. And she went into eternity.

The second and the third and the fourth and all the rest up to twenty eighth also found their eternal reward sooner than they had expected, with their responses of "The Kingabile, the head of the Swiss Guard, the Orator, the janitor. The Inquisitor had to stop to wash his sword. The King was exasperated in a fury that promised he was about to destroy the entire world. And the twain approached one solitary man.

"Who are you," demanded the King.

"I am Roy," he answered.

"Roy? As in royal? Are you royal?"

"Hardly, just a common, ordinary priest, Sir."

"Really? And what is your ministry, if I may be so bold as to ask, " the King was getting used to mufti, after so many rebuffs.

"Peace."

"Ah! Yes. But of course. Peace on earth, good will to men. That sort of thing, eh?"

"Yes, Sir."

"Well, then, there, now, Roy," in a low and threatening tone, all efforts at disguise discarded. "Tell me! Who is the most important man in this peaceful kingdom to which you minister?"

"I am."

"Off with his head," came the quite usual and equally immediate response from Absolute Power.

"Wait, Sir. A moment. If you will. I know who you are. And I know who I am." He paused, prayed his prayer in the silence of his soul to his silent God, "I am the most important person in this Kingdom of yours."

Startled, his hand still held up to stop the swinging sword, the King shuddered, as an insight was obviously on the way , "And what, Roy, could possibly be the reason you feel that way?"

"Because, King, I am the one with whom you are speaking at this moment."

And Father Roy bowed his head.

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THE SOA WATCH

From the website for SOA WATCH: http://www.soaw.org/:

SOA Watch is an independent organization that seeks to close the US Army School of the Americas, under whatever name it is called, through vigils and fasts, demonstrations and nonviolent protest, as well as media and legislative work.

On November 16, 1989, six Jesuit priests, their co-worker and her teenage daughter were massacred in El Salvador. A U.S. Congressional Task Force reported that those responsible were trained at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) at Ft. Benning, Georgia.
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Today, the SOA Watch movement is a large, diverse, grassroots movement rooted in solidarity with the people of Latin America. The goal of SOA Watch is to close the SOA and to change U.S. foreign policy in Latin America by educating the public, lobbying Congress and participating in creative, nonviolent resistance. The Pentagon has responded to the growing movement and Congress' near closure of the SOA with a PR campaign to give the SOA a new image. In an attempt to disassociate the school with its horrific past, the SOA was renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in January of 2001.