Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [118]
Pilla’s vision of the church as an urban anchor was rooted in Catholic social teaching, a shared responsibility to the Other. Sister Schenk and Bishop Pilla were poised to be natural allies in helping at-risk parishes as the priesthood lost greater numbers of men. Six months after his City Club speech, Pilla voiced worries of “the graying of the priestly fraternity,” in a presidential address to the national bishops’ conference in Washington, D.C. Priests, he said, “worry about the slow fade-out for the priesthood, at least as we have known it.”13 But Rome’s hand in church politics required that Pilla praise the “promise of celibate chastity,” even though celibacy was driving away men in record numbers. Sister Chris Schenk had no inkling that the bigger problem for FutureChurch was the mess surrounding Pilla himself.
LOOKING FOR JESUS
Born in 1946, Chris Schenk was the eldest of four daughters raised in a close family in Lima, which is nestled in Ohio farm country. Her father, a decorated war veteran, sold life insurance; her mother, whose nursing studies had been cut short by the war, influenced Schenk, her sister, and two cousins to choose nursing over teaching, she recalls.
People drawn to the religious life often experience the sweep of a spiritual force, a beauty suggesting God’s love, seeding the imagination with a passion for the search, finding grace in service to others. As a young girl, sitting alone on the front steps, she was overcome by a feeling of primordial mystery in the radiance of trees, the leaves in early sunlight shimmering in the breeze. At Mass, the Latin antiphons Introibo ad altare Dei, the quavering bells, the aromas of incense, and the luminous colors of the stained-glass windows filled her with wonder for a loving God. “I just couldn’t figure out how Harry Miller got to swing the incense when he wasn’t nearly as smart or as well behaved as I.” At Mass, she thought, If only I were a boy, I would be a priest. But I can’t. I’m a girl.
During senior year in high school, while teaching catechism to the children of Latino farmworkers, she was struck by the families’ purity of faith. She headed off to Washington, D.C., on scholarship at Georgetown University’s nursing school. In the social tumult of the 1960s, Chris Schenk’s notion of a loving God “clashed with America’s role in the Vietnam war, rampant racism and urban riots.”14 She found solace in the dirgelike rhythms of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. A Jesuit chaplain for medical and nursing students, Father William Kaifer, counseled her as she wrestled with betrayal. If God is loving, why is the world torn by violence and corruption? They discussed free will; she tried to square her despair with her “industrial-strength Ohio Catholicism.” One day Kaifer said, “What would it mean if you found that God did exist?” She knew immediately: she would dedicate her life to that Being, try to bring love to a sinful world.
In college she discovered the works of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit evolutionary philosopher. As a paramedic with French troops in World War I, Teilhard found an essence of Christ crucified in the carnage. He went on to do pioneering paleontological work in China. Church authorities suppressed Teilhard’s writings, which treated scientific findings on planetary growth as expressions of God’s design.15 He died on Easter Sunday 1955, in New York, exiled from his community in France. His posthumously published books quickly became classics. Chris Schenk found inspiration in Teilhard’s words.
I know that the powers of evil, considered in their deliberate and malign action, can do nothing to trouble the divine milieu around me. As they try