For the people who
love our church or basically
the faith we have been given, I write
out of my own hurt.
Though I belong willingly
I find I now utterly reject
the malignant tumor of power
I grew up in that turned
our Father into a monster demanding
submission or sin or in more prosaic terms:
“shape up, cough up, and shut up”.
It is through God´s grace in the powerless
that I have come to know God´s Kingdom
which goes way beyond democracy to
the fraternity the Jewish powerful rejected;
the early Church wouldn´t tolerate and
with Constantine´s help pulled away from
to begin its decadence into power.
Maintaining its hold through obedience or sin
until a most un- Pope like character, John XXIII,
gave us a glimpse of Church
as Christ himself understood it:
A Kingdom of shared dignity, of service
across the board, of salvation not manipulation.
This is the Church I shall die in.
-Fr. Leo Donnelly
