NYTimes

The parishioners of St. Francis in Boston receive holy communion 

As modern liberal Americans, we are used to thinking about Christians as the dominant religious force in our society, wielding their faith sometimes with grace, often as a cudgel, but always as the biggest, baddest gorilla in the room.  So confident are some of these Christians in their superiority, in their unshakable “rightness,” they feel free to occupy themselves with petty notions of moral rectitude that have little to do with the core tenets of Christianity itself. 

It was not always so. In some places it still isn’t.

The earliest days of the Christian church were days of fragility and trepidation.  Viewed as a suspicious new sect by the Judaic powers, and as a “dangerous superstition” by many in the Roman Empire, early Christian worship often had to be held in secret, its followers hiding their faith lest they be stoned or jailed. The early communities of followers of Christ were close-knit.  They had to be.  They were a distinct, misunderstood and often despised minority.  Christians didn’t start to get that swagger that comes from the expectation of dominance until the Emperor Constantine converted in the fourth century.  They huddled in churches, performing their rites always in fear that they might be discovered and that there might be consequences.

Many people either don’t know or choose to forget that before it was its own religion with its own institutions, Christianity was considered merely a wacky sect of the Jewish faith, one that appeared to have the barbarous custom of consuming the flesh of its alleged messiah, and held “love feasts” as their primary worship ceremony, suggesting orgiastic ritual. To be involved in a Christian church was to set yourself firmly on the outside of what society considered acceptable.

In many countries unenlightened by our First Amendment principle that there shall be no national religion, practicing any religion other than the state-approved one is grounds for imprisonment.  For instance, in China, there are two state-sanctioned Christian churches, and they are both controlled by the Communist Party.  Membership in any other church, or even attending Sunday school, will earn you jail time.  Though Christianity is not technically illegal in India, organized violence against Christian churches is on the rise, and political persecution in some provinces is encouraged.  To be a Christian in one of these countries is to be on the outside.  You are professing a faith that earns you the possibility of being discriminated against, imprisoned, hurt or even killed.

To encounter one of these communities of faith is a humbling experience.  Because in this day and age in this country, how many of us really ever have to ask ourselves in earnest what we are willing to suffer for what we believe?  How many of us gather with our friends knowing that the fellowship is so risky that anyone present, indeed all present could meet with disaster, and the whole enterprise could be lost without vigilance? This is not how Americans think about the prospect of going to church.

Well, not most Americans. But like with many things, there are exceptions.

In St. Francis Xavier Cabrini Church in Boston, vigilance is a way of life.  Parishioners sleep in the sacristy in sleeping bags and in recliners in the vestibule.  There is someone guarding the church, day and night, protecting it.  About 100 of the faithful have been on this continuous vigil for over 1500 days (over four years).  And if they slip up, their worst fear will be realized – the Boston Archdiocese will lock them out and sell the building, part of a plan the Catholic Church hatched in the wake of the child molestation scandal to pay reparations in Boston by closing and selling some of its more valuable real estate holdings.

St. Francis’s faithful have not had a priest for four years.  Parishioners lead their own services, doing everything but the very priestly activity of blessing the host.  Sometimes they get sympathetic priests from other parishes to bless wafers for them so that they may distribute communion host.  They hold church suppers, do charity work, and even open the church to outsiders who need someone to tell their troubles do. Like the four other “vigil churches” in the Boston area, they do have legal actions pending either before the Vatican or in local court.  The Archdiocese did make one attempt to move to evict the St. Francis parishioners already – in October, 2004 the Archdiocese changed all the locks on the doors to the church.  Miraculously, a fire door was left open and the parishioners gained reentry to the church, continuing the vigil.

The exercise of maintaining this vigil has brought this community of parishioners together in a bond that is remarkable for its intensity, and has reportedly strengthened their commitment to their faith, if not to the institution that is their current nemesis.  After all, once you’ve committed to spending several nights a month in a sleeping bag in a church vestibule so that you may keep your place of worship, you’ve already demonstrated that you are willing to put yourself way out of your comfort zone for what you believe. Living what you believe on a daily basis at that point is no longer an academic exercise. It now governs the core of your being, and every thought, word and deed that emanate form it.

Unlike a lot of American Christians, the parishioners at St. Francis in Boston do not need to ask themselves what it means to live their faith.  They don’t slap a bumper sticker on their car and think that’s a statement of their faith.  They don’t have time to worry about whether or not their neighbor is as pious as they are.  They don’t even worry anymore about not having a priest.  Their very existence as a parish is at stake. The minutiae are irrelevant.

In many respects, these Boston rebels are not unlike other Bostonians before them, men who fomented rebellion against a powerful institution.  Men who had to ask themselves how much they were willing to give up for what they believed – because if the British Colonial government caught wind that they were part of the “Sons of Liberty” they might be imprisoned or hanged for sedition. For these men, freedom was not just a nice idea that they talked about – it was worth risking your life for. Eventually, they and other believers across the country would take up arms, endure great pain and hardship, and forge a nation from their beliefs.

Like the Early Christians, the Early Americans couldn’t afford the swagger they possess now. We now walk the world stage believing we are entitled to deference because of our high principles and military muscle.  It was not always so.

Was that why it was so easy for Bushies to have their way so freely with our Constitution and some of its most dearly cherished tenets? Confident in our superiority, in our unshakable “rightness,” did we get lost in the minutiae? Probably.  Lord knows the amount of ink that was spilt over whether a President’s sexual dalliances really constitute the kind of “high crimes and misdemeanors” that warrant impeachment was vastly disproportionate to the actual relevance of the issue to the American Experiment in freedom and self-rule.  And the finer points of partisan politics surely don’t rise to the level of being a cornerstone of our hard-won rights as Americans.

So how do we get it back?  In a political landscape that has become fraught with partisan spin and procedural gyration and media palpitation, how do you get back to the days when it was all about freedom, and being willing to die to preserve it?

Hopefully the lesson of the Rebels of St. Francis is not that it will take us coming close to losing everything as a nation for us to finally build our government in a way that our forefathers might recognize as respecting their most dearly held principles of freedom.  Hopefully we do not need to get that far along the path of ruin before turning back. I’m hoping the Rebels of St. Francis will remind us that it is still possible in the modern age to put yourself on the line for what you believe, and indeed, one could argue that you aren’t really living up to what you believe until you do.