Bulletins from the Human Side

The elements thought by the early philosophers to have exploded out of the very eye of the hurricane of creation that scattered the galaxies across the cosmos -- earth, air, water and fire -- turned, as uncontrollable storms do, to wail and burn and wash over us all, leaving us, as religious mystery does, blinded by its light and unable to hurl even a word into the maw of its enveloping force.

Andrew Greeley, who was so deeply involved in the things of time, broke free of his shackles last week to enter fully the eternity whose boundaries he broke as easily as a champion miler does the tape on almost every day of his long and remarkable life.

I knew Andrew for half a century and, thinking of his quick smile and his twinkling eyes, I recall his telling me once that he expected heaven to be a homecoming, the scene of a family reunion whose joy is not threatened by the certainty that its magic and mystery will end with sundown.

On Easter Sunday, Mary Louise Schniedwind shook free of the shackles of time to be waived across the border into the Eternal. No need to check her papers; she had been there before, and everybody knew her anyway. She was in her 98th year, acting and looking much younger, still as single-eyed as we are bidden to be in the Bible and, as everyone blessed enough to know can tell you, ever-youthful in her interests and activities, less concerned with what was past than with what was yet to come.

A high tide of conventional analysis of Pope Francis -- is he conservative or progressive, a reformer in fact or a pastor at heart -- misses the central significance of Pope Benedict XVI's resignation and Pope Francis' election. They constitute one event whose meaning cries out for our attention but is drowned out by the re-enactment in our time of the myth of Babel, in which Yahweh turned the talk of the self-important tower builders (TV towers today) into babble.

A major eastern newspaper says Cardinal Roger Mahony, retired archbishop of Los Angeles, is lucky not to be in jail after recently released archdiocesan documents were cited as evidence that he covered up many priests accused of sexually abusing those in their care, avoided reporting them to the police, and allowed them, after treatment and admonishment, to return quasi-purified to work as priests again.