SFO Rule Article XIII: As the Father sees in very person the features of his Son, the first-born of many brothers and sisters, so the Secular Franciscans with a gentle and courteous spirit accept all people as a gift of the Lord and an image of Christ.
A sense of community will make them joyful and ready to place themselves on an equal basis with all people, especially with the lowly for whom they shall strive to create conditions of life worthy of people redeemed by Christ.
CCC 1935: Every form of social or cultural discrimination in fundamental personal rights on the grounds of sex, race, color, social conditions, language, or religion must be curbed and eradicated as incompatible with God’s design.
In 1964, three young civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, were murdered in Mississippi. They had gone there as "Freedom Summer" volunteers to educate blacks and help them to vote. Because of that, they were beaten and shot to death by the KKK. Their bodies were found later that summer in an earthen dam. Nineteen men were indicted on federal conspiracy charges (the state judge had dismissed the indictments) but only seven were convicted and none of those convicted served longer than six years in prison. Three men, including Edgar Ray Killen, received mistrials. Killen received the mistrial because, although 11 jurors voted for conviction, one held out and refused to convict him because he was a pastor. The State of Mississippi never brought murder charges against anyone connected with the case until now. On January 6th, Edgar Ray Killen, now 79, was arrested and charged with first degree murder. One of the men convicted of conspiracy in 1964, Billy Wayne Posey, let the press know what he thought of the arrest: "After 40 years to come back and do something like this is ridiculous…like a nightmare."
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Britain’s Prince Harry caused an uproar when a tabloid published a photograph of him at a costume party dressed like a Nazi soldier, complete with a swastika on his armband. January 27th marks the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, an anniversary Harry’s grandmother, Queen Elizabeth, is commemorating by inviting survivors of the Nazi death camps and British World War II veterans who liberated them to a reception at St. James' Palace. Yet, even as opposition leaders and former ministers are calling for Harry to make a public apology, some people are excusing him because ‘it didn’t mean anything,’ or ‘he’s not very intellectually bright,’ or ‘he’s been through a lot, so he should be excused.’ And, after all, it’s been 60 years since WWII. What harm did he inflict?
Does the passage of 40 years do away with need for justice or the passage of 60 years render a symbol of heinous bigotry and hatred into little more than a party joke? The families of the murdered civil rights workers have had to live with photographs showing the murderers smirking and chewing Red Man tobacco at their indictment, sure that no one would testify against them. Millions of people died horrific deaths in the Nazi death camps. We all have seen the photographs and the films of the emaciated bodies falling like so much useless garbage into mass graves. If we say that 40 years without charges expunges the guilt of an unrepentant murderer (and doesn’t it make it worse that he was a pastor?) or that 60 years of remembering the Holocaust is long enough and now we should simply shrug when callow young men wear Nazi uniforms to swill beer at a costume party, then we are doomed to repeat all the same horrible mistakes.
For Franciscans, though, shrugging off injustice or callowness flies in the face of our profession. Article XIII of the Rule reminds us that everyone -- black, white, red, yellow, Christian, Jew, Muslim, atheist -- is a gift of the Lord and an image of Christ. We are to place ourselves on an equal basis with everyone. The Catechism teaches us that all prejudice and discrimination is incompatible with God’s design. Further, we have a moral obligation to eradicate both prejudice and discrimination. When we truly live our Rule, we hold ourselves accountable to God for our own weaknesses and prejudices and then assure that our society holds accountable both those who would perpetuate and those who would excuse injustice, prejudice, and discrimination.
