For Whom the Bell Tolls →

The chapel here at OSV has a bell. Or rather, it has a recording of a bell that whoever is serving Mass that day activates by pushing a button in the sacristy five minutes before Mass is scheduled to begin. The recording plays throughout the building on our public-address system, sometimes triggering the prepare-for-an-announcement tone before the bells start ringing, and always ending abruptly in the midst of the last bell.

Still, we at OSV are rather fond of that bell, which reminds all of us, even when we cannot attend Mass, of the sacrifice that is about to take place and calls us to pause, however briefly, to join ourselves spiritually to that sacrifice.

Living in service of others →

Mass this morning at Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic Church in Huntington was no more sparsely attended than any previous Saturday morning. But following the guidelines established by the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, the faithful dutifully staggered themselves among the pews. Families sat together, but everyone else maintained a healthy distance of more than 6 feet.

As in other dioceses, Bishop Kevin Rhoades has ordered the removal of missalettes and hymnals from all of the pews. I brought my copy of the March issue of Magnificat to Mass and noticed a few others who did the same, and a couple of people had their own daily missals. Seeing the hymnal board with no numbers on it was a bit more jarring than I expected, but since traditional Lenten hymns such as “These 40 Days of Lent,” “The Glory of These 40 Days,” and “O Sacred Head Surrounded” are so well known, there’s reason to hope that music will return soon to our celebration of Mass. If not, that will be one more thing that we can offer up in a spirit of Lenten sacrifice, and for the sake of all of those affected — physically, emotionally and spiritually — by the coronavirus and the measures put in place to combat it.

A day of change →

It’s 11 a.m., and the chapel is dark, except for the spotlight over the crucifix and the flickering flame that reminds us that Christ is truly present in the purple-robed tabernacle.

We hold Mass at 11 a.m. every day here at OSV, but today is not a normal day. Yesterday afternoon, Kyle Hamilton, our CEO, announced that the senior leadership team had made the decision to disperse the workforce as much as possible. Those who can work remotely are doing so; those who must be in the office or on the production floor are here, but practicing “social distancing” and taking every precaution.

The coronavirus and a stark reminder that wellness was not always a given →

One of the most popular books for Lenten reading in the Eastern Catholic and Orthodox churches is “The Ladder of Divine Ascent” by St. John Climacus. St. John, a seventh-century monk and abbot of a monastery on Mount Sinai, wrote “The Ladder” for his fellow monks. Divided into 30 “steps,” the book uses the image of Jacob’s ladder (cf. Gn 28:10-19) as a metaphor for the monk’s advancement in the Christian life. . . .

I’ve read a chapter of “The Ladder of Divine Ascent” every day during Lent a few times over the past 25 or so years, each time finding deeper meaning in different steps, depending on my state in life. As I work my way through it again for the first time in probably seven years, I have been more aware than ever of St. John’s emphasis, step after step, on the need to keep our own mortality ever before our eyes.

Meet Rod Blago

As the former governor of Illinois crisscrossed the country on his farewell tour, I kept imagining him lying back in his seat, scalp being massaged by his personal hairstylist (it takes work to keep that Serbian gangster hairdo in pristine shape), while an old Mac Davis song played on an endless loop on his iPod:

O Lord, it’s hard to be humble

When you’re perfect in every way

I can’t wait to look in the mirror

’cause I get better looking each day

“Here, Bobby, hold that mirror up.  I gotta work on my smile.  Those gals on The View are gonna fall for my eyes.”

And fall they did.  Once Hot Rod’s hand was on her knee, Whoopi Goldberg could feel his pain.  A colored man just can’t get a break in the white man’s world.

In the end, though, it was Blagojevich who fell the hardest, but that wasn’t his fault, either.  Turns out that federal district attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is a regular Mr. Potter, trying to keep Milorad Bailey from helping the people of Illinois live a wonderful life.  On January 23, he explained it all to WLS’s Don Wade and Roma:

You know those old black and white movies from the 30’s and the 40’s with Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper? Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It Happened One Night and Meet John Doe and the other one is Mr. Deeds Goes to Town? How the good guy was up against the establishment, and yet they tried to make him look like he had violated rules, but he stood firm for the people because he was trying to help people in all of those movies. . . .

That’s what my story is.  It’s a Frank Capra movie.

In this 21st-century remake of It’s a Wonderful Life, the score, of course, is also by Mac Davis.

Some folks say that I’m egotistical.

Hell, I don’t even know what that means.

I guess it has something to do with the way that I

fill out my skin-tight blue jeans.

With his leather bomber jacket, those blue jeans were Governor Blagojevich’s business suit.  (Business casual was sweats and running shoes.)  Some might find that a bit down-market for the governor of the sixth-largest state in the Union, but those jeans are the uniform of the working man, and Rod Blagojevich is nothing if not true to his roots.

That’s why he voted for Ronald Reagan (twice!), he told Chicago’s morning commuters, but as a working-class Democrat

I like to see myself more as a Teddy Roosevelt kind of Republican than Richard Nixon. The guy who’s fightin’ for the average guy. And willing to, you know, be in the arena and have his face marred by dust and sweat and blood—strive valiantly and err and come short again and again. Because there is not effort without error and shortcoming, but who actually strives to do the deed.

With such a mastery of syntax, is it any wonder that, in conversations taped by federal investigators just days before his arrest and indictment, Governor Blagojevich still thought he might one day rise to the office then occupied by George W. Bush?

And who knows?  He might have, if not for the treacherous Potter—er, Patrick—Fitzgerald.  But once the arrest and the indictment came down, the Illinois House finally did the right thing and impeached the governor.  At that point, he had only two choices: Return to his ancestral homeland and get lost in the mountains of Montenegro, or go down fighting.

He chose to fight, but in his own special way.  Where a lesser man might actually have shown up for his impeachment trial and attempted to mount a credible defense, this son of an immigrant steel-mill worker went on every TV and radio talk show that would have him and defended himself against charges no one had leveled.

Democrats hated him because they wanted to raise taxes, and he wouldn’t let them; Republicans hated him because they wanted the Democrats to raise taxes so they could campaign on the issue.  Everybody hated him because he, like Mother Teresa, cared for the sick and the poor, especially children.  But they were all so corrupt that they would hate Mother Teresa, too, as he revealed on the Today Show: “You can conceivably bring in 15 angels and 20 saints led by Mother Teresa to come in to testify to my good character, to my integrity and all the rest.  It wouldn’t matter.”  (Why a Serb would want to be defended by an Albanian was a question that, sadly, nobody asked.)

When he finally arrived in Springfield (a rare event in his two terms as governor) and deigned to make an appearance at his own impeachment trial, his long-winded defense could be summed up in two lines: “To know me is to love me. / I must be a hell of a man.”

Well, he was half right.  So long, Hot Rod, and thanks for the nine-billion-dollar deficit. 

First published in the April 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.