Dateline: Colorado Springs
Nussbaum, Melissa Musick
THE LAST WORD DATELINE: COLORADO SPRINGS Melissa Musick Nussbaum he Catholic Church in Colorado Springs usually flies under the radar. We are a small diocese, carved out of Denver's...
...all receive from the one loaf, pray the same prayers, sing the same songs, make the same confession of sin...
...Namely: How does a Catholic live...
...Most of my life is broken into divisions of property and occupation and memberships...
...what's offered on the altar isn't for sale...
...But there are, I believe, questions prior to the bishop's...
...When I pick up my son at school and bring cash for a sports fee...
...T Commonweal 3 I June 4, 2004...
...It is not because they don't matter, but because they simply matter less than who we are and what brings us together, the work we have been given to do: to be the Body of Christ, fed by the Body of Christ, rooted in the heart of Christ and his church, going out in the world to be Christ for the world...
...We walk tall through our lives, erect, unbending, Gary Cooper at high noon...
...Americans don't bow...
...Who can buy here, work here, belong here...
...It is my parish, too...
...We have to learn to care for one another and to pray with one another, learn together to care for the sick and to clothe the naked, to welcome the stranger, and to feed the hungry...
...Republican...
...Not an American moment, but a Catholic moment, one in an unbroken chain of moments, Sunday after Sunday, from first-century Jerusalem to twenty-firstcentury Colorado Springs...
...I walk there, hands open and outstretched, like a beggar...
...We are like the Ephesians under John the Apostle...
...Mary's, it is the least American hour of my week...
...He listened, saying, "Of course, but first we must learn this one...
...The bishop, yes or no...
...See the face of Christ in all its distressing disguises...
...Melissa Musick Nussbaum is a writer who has taught Scripture at St...
...We've learned at St...
...One question we're asking is based on the compromise that is politics: What if both candidates are proabortion...
...There is one cup in my parish: one cup for the soldiers shipping out for Iraq and one cup for the activists indicted for trespassing on military property...
...Marry...
...Elders went to him pleading for a new lesson...
...I'm not trading dollars for services...
...Our bishop, Michael Sheridan, has raised an important question: How should American Catholics vote...
...Mary's Cathedral in Colorado Springs for nineteen years...
...The man who supports school vouchers shares the sign of peace with the teachers' union member who opposes him...
...Make a home...
...Mary's, those of us who gather at God's generous table, are still learning to live the answers...
...We are welcome there, all of us...
...The Republican nurse stops after Mass to tell my ailing Democrat mother that she will come by her house to help next week...
...Mary's with those who do...
...We are not one in politics, but politics doesn't call us together...
...We are a small diocese, carved out of Denver's archdiocese in the 1980s, with a tradition of strong lay leadership...
...But at Mass, I bend and bow, kneeling like a servant, on my knees like a slave...
...Jerome says John preached only one sermon, "My children, love one another...
...But at Mass there's nothing to buy...
...We are talking about our bishop's latest statement barring prochoice politicians and even voters from Communion, but neither exclusively nor primarily...
...This is the work of our lives, the work that will take a lifetime to learn...
...And, from what I see on Sundays, we are still walking together, singing together on the way to Communion...
...No politician runs on the Catholic ticket or holds herself accountable only to Catholics...
...Happy...
...We are called by Christ, in whom we are one...
...Like all the American women I know, I take my purse everywhere...
...We are a diocese of soldiers and peace activists, and our cathedral's long association with the Marian House Soup Kitchen next door means that the bishop's church is also the parish for the Catholic homeless...
...The mayor doesn't live in a shelter, but he kneels in St...
...These are not peculiarly American questions, but they are Catholic ones, and we at St...
...Raise children...
...Mary's don't talk much about these differences, the same differences discussed endlessly on television and in the newspapers...
...We at St...
...My vote is an exercise in further division...
...So it was a surprise to find ourselves in the national news, interviewed by reporters looking for that most American invention, the sound bite, about that most American ritual, voting...
...Pray...
...When I stop to fill the car with gas and buy a gallon of mills...
...Angry...
...Catholics who say one's baptism can mean little or nothing in public life need to reconsider what happens in those waters...
...No one is preferred...
...In a city where the Bijou Community protests the military downtown every Friday as soldiers from Fort Carson pass by, we've had to learn the lesson of every fam. . *. A. Am r. A. V„WAVA.W•''w i''''Ah[NRR~f~~r•~i~~i~ 11111111111111111111 ANTONUCC fly, how to get along despite our differences...
...Care for the widow and the orphan, the elderly and the unborn...
...Which vote endangers one's immortal soul...
...When I gather Sunday mornings with other parishioners at St...
...Mary's that Communion gathers up these broken shards and makes us whole...
...At Mass, I bow...
...Democrat...
...Communicated or ex...
Vol. 131 • June 2004 • No. 11
