Observations: A Lesson from Saint Peter’s Mother-in-Law

On Sunday mornings, my wife and I attend the 7:30 Mass. We have experienced the evolution of most Catholic parents: when our children were young, we went to the 9:30 “children’s Mass,” complete with cry room for bawling infants. When we had teenagers, it was the 10:30 “guitar Mass,” complete with Simon and Garfunkel. Now our kids are grown. On Sunday, while most of our suburban neighborhood is still asleep, we, along with 50 or 60 other middle-aged parishioners, hear Mass blessed by the peace that only early Sunday morning can bestow.

As it is said, there is more felicity on the far side of baldness than youth can ever imagine. When Rhett Butler, facing middle age, was preparing to leave Scarlett (just before he told her he didn’t give a damn), he spoke about his need to go back to his birthplace of Charleston where he hoped to find “the genial grace of days that are gone.” I now know what he meant. That’s the feeling I get in the stillness of the 7:30 Mass. It reminds me of my youth, of early-morning Masses I served as an altar-boy. I return, for a while, to the genial grace of a church in which I felt at home.

On a recent Sunday morning, a visiting priest gave an excellent, well-prepared sermon on Jesus as “the One for others” and of our duty to emulate His selflessness. The priest mentioned Christ’s answer to those who asked when they had fed Him, clothed Him, or taken care of Him: “I assure you, as often as you did it for one of my least brothers, you did it for me.”

After Mass I thought about the people who had been in church that morning: mostly middle-aged, like me, and none, to my knowledge, a social activist. What about ordinary people like them, or younger ones, married couples with kids, who just go to work, get the kids out to school, pay the mortgage, cook the meals, mow the lawn, take the kids to soccer practice, pay taxes, and take out the garbage to the curb on Tuesdays and Thursdays? Where do they fit into this demand to help “the least of my brothers”?

The message that accompanied the U.S. bishops’ pastoral letter on the economy stated: “As pastors, we also see the decency, generosity and vulnerability of our people. We see the struggles of ordinary families to make ends meet and provide a better future for their children…. It is the faith, good will and generosity of our people that gives us hope as we write this letter.”

But everyone knows that despite passages like this and others similar to it, praising the idealized concept of “the family,” the workaday family is taken for granted by the activist clergy who control the bureaucratic decision-making machinery of the Church in the United States, at the diocesan and national level. “Social justice” has come to mean political activism and liberal government policies. Parents, unless they join approved organizations or vote the correct way, are not considered part of the process of social justice.

Yet who is better able to say, “I clothed the naked, fed the hungry and gave money to the impoverished” than a mother and father whose babies come into this world naked and hungry and poor  — not to mention wet? And this kind of giving goes on every single day, often for 20 years or until the kids are on their feet. Sometimes it goes on for a lifetime.

Talk about “a preferential option for the poor”! Parents make that choice every day, not through some government program, in which the taxpayer is protected from the grungy reality of need by the antiseptic processes of government, but in daily, face-to- face confrontations with their own children, with each other and with themselves, extending over many years, dealing with every human emotion, good and bad, savage and noble, and every variety of human want.

Every day parents are feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, making certain, always at some sacrifice, that these little ones (yes, even when these little ones become dreaded teenagers) are taken care of — every day keeping three or five or seven people out of poverty, maybe starting out as a young married couple with almost nothing, working through the years, getting a raise here, losing a job there, plugging away. But in recent years if they didn’t boycott grapes or failed to support the latest left-liberal economic social theory, parents were scolded by the activist clergy for not caring and lacking compassion for those in need.

It might be argued that taking care of kids, keeping the house clean, cooking the meals, mowing the lawn, and paying taxes are what parents are supposed to do. Why should we take notice of such mundane activity, when there are so many victims of social injustice in our society and around the world, so many government programs to be funded, so many criticisms to be made of public officials who do not subscribe to the current intellectual and economic fashions? Parents are only doing their job.

But that is exactly my point — the only reason there aren’t millions and tens of millions more victims of poverty and need is that ordinary people do what they are supposed to do. That is not heroic sanctity and it is not the stuff of television docu-dramas about the Problem of the Month. But such activity is at the very heart of any policy of true social justice. Most parents don’t do it very well. Most of us realize that a true portrait of family life more closely resembles the mystery and the chaos of a Jackson Pollack drip-painting than the sentimental clichés of a Norman Rockwell illustration. But the things ordinary people do every day without the world (i.e., the media) or the Church (i.e., the bureaucracy) ever taking notice, maintain the balance of sanity and decency that are necessary for civilization. Surely this is a major contribution to social justice.

There is a legend that says the prayers of contemplative nuns keep together the meridians of the world. Well, in the same way, the daily, boring tasks of fathers and mothers keep the world spinning. The Church in the United States, with its emphasis on political activism and government programs, is not paying enough attention to all this drab, commonplace, ordinary, absolutely necessary muddling-through.

All of which brings me to St. Peter’s mother-in-law. We meet Saint Peter’s mother-in-law in the briefest of gospel glimpses in Mark 1:29 and in Matthew 8:14: “Jesus entered Peter’s house and found Peter’s mother-in-law in bed with a fever. He took her by the hand and the fever left her. She got up at once and began to wait on him.”

Peter’s mother-in-law is one of the great heroines of the gospel, all the more delightful because what she did was so normal. She is a reminder that even the least of us can play some role in the great scheme of social justice, as long as what we do — keeping the house clean, mowing the lawn, taking a car-pool of yelling six-year-olds to a birthday party — serves Christ in some way.

I do not intend to glorify some cult of the ordinary. Christ made it clear that His way is hard and that we must be willing to sacrifice all, even family, to be one of His followers. So we cannot say the virtues of domesticity are the highest we can attain or must seek. But not all of us can make the perfect sacrifice.

Perhaps the reason many Catholics don’t pay more attention to the bishops’ pastoral letters is that they aren’t addressed to the spiritual descendants of Peter’s mother-in-law, ordinary people just doing their jobs.

Recent pastoral letters speak with two voices. One is what might be called the voice of Vatican Square. The vast majority of Catholics, especially the ones I am talking about, love the sound of that voice. It reminds them, gently but firmly, that they are not perfect, that they have to do better, that there is no room for complacency. It is the voice of spiritual realities.

But there is another voice present in these and other recent social documents of the American Church what I call the voice of Harvard Yard, a voice rich and cultured in tone, given to subtle distinctions, pleasant, educated, informed, liberal, and, above all, reasonable, the kind of voice one might hear at a seminar at Harvard, the voice of the intellectual ruling class in the United States. It is the voice of ideological propaganda, a voice Catholics distrust, whether it comes from the left or the right. They distrust it even more when it tries to disguise itself as the voice of the gospels.

When Jesus cured Peter’s mother-in-law, she got up and started serving Him and, probably, cooking for the crowd. She wasn’t performing some kind of dramatic action for the local poor or leading a movement for social justice. But she also served, in both senses of the word. Somebody has to do the ordinary jobs upon which society is built, and without which such terms as “social justice” are meaningless. Millions like her today, men and women whose names will never appear on a list of social activists, do the drab, boring jobs without which the liberal programs of social justice would be impossible.

The Church in the United States should once again start speaking in the voice of ordinary people. I believe that when Jesus took the hand of Peter’s mother-in-law and cured her fever, whatever He said to her was said in that voice. In the quiet of the 7:30 Mass, I can hear that voice again.

Author

  • William F. Gavin

    William F. Gavin is a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. For eighteen years he was a senior aide to former House Minority Leader Robert Michel. He lives in McLean, Virginia.

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