Posted by
John Sullivan on Monday, December 03, 2007 11:48:34 PM
CAPTAIN'S BLOG: STARDATE 10
The first few years since retirement from the Navy were not easy ones for me, but I made a difficult choice even more difficult when deciding to come to St. Petersburg, Florida in the Fall of 2003. In 2002 I came here for the first time, and hearing a radio station on the air called Spirit FM and I was duly impressed. It sounded very much like a station heard elsewhere called K-Love, but the DJ's were talking about real life issues, and not what I normally find on Florida religious radio stations, and that is some guy telling us in a contrived distortion of the human language pattern God hates gays and that God wants women to sit in the back row, hide their faces with veils, and shut up. Actually, I think God becomes confused with the views and opinions of St. Paul speaking to a 1st Century friend named Timothy, but that's beside the point. I remember staying in a cheap hotel on 34th Street at the end of U.S. 19 in St. Petersburg and remember gunshots and police sirens throughout the night. It was then that I decided I should probably move to Orlando instead after retirement from the Navy, because at least I knew that city well. I wanted to come down here and work as a Defense Contractor, and to my amazement and dismay, those jobs still elude me, for unknown reasons.
But, by happenstance I got a second chance to visit St. Petersburg only by the alignment of cities. I was on a last-ditch whirlwind tour through the State to decide where to move, which brought me through Tallahassee, Panama City, Jacksonville, Titusville, Melbourne, West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, the Keys, Alligator Alley, Naples, Fort Meyers, and Sarasota. There was only one way back, and that was through the Tampa Bay Area.
I took a wrong turn, and ended up on the wrong bridge. The sun was out this time, and so were some of the best people I had ever met in my life. I decided to buy a map and spend a few days here. I have never regretted that decision - well, not often or for long.
On my second tour, the first thing I noticed about the Tampa Bay Area, a wide landscape now encapsulating far more than simply the large cities of Tampa and St. Petersburg was that the place had more strip bars per capita than Shinjuku, a suburb of Tokyo well known for its debauchery and tolerance for the mega-trillion dollar sex industry. The second thing I noticed was that there seemed to be an incredible diverse population that unlike Atlanta, San Francisco, New York, and other places, did not necessarily have "ethnic" neighborhoods - although this is changing rapidly in some places where there now appear to be more Mexicans here than Cubans, and they congregate into their own little communities, wanting none of the assimilation that other recent arrivals are experiencing and in fact enjoying.
The third thing I noticed was just how good this Spirit FM radio station was, if only because the rest of the Tampa Bay radio market is so pitiful against other markets of similar size, starting with neighboring Orlando. It is no lie that Pensacola even does better. (Salem's WGUL a few years ago made a transition from "Oldies" to talk, yet this improvement does not make up for the delta between the Tampa market and cities as small as Pensacola or Gainesville). Well, I told my self, filled with ambition for life after the Navy, I would just come here to show the boys here how to make big-market shows out of a small town mentality. Well, no. ClearChannel, Genesis and Salem don't really care that it's so bad, or that half of the stations are nothing but a computer drive connected to an antenna. Apparently, the listeners, the captive audience don't seem to mind, either - or know what they're missing, because hosts are renewed and ads seem to sell to the satisfaction of the local groups running this pathetic market.
So thus, I quickly found that Spirit FM was my station of choice. It had all of the things I loved about the radio ... a little traffic, a little news, and a lot of fun, and the added advantages of prayer lines and song requests. While I lament that the local market has no idea how miserable the aggregate is here, cities all over the U.S. don't know how unfortunate they are that they don't have a Spirit FM in their town. Then one day, even while I was visiting, I heard someone interview a very personable voice who the interviewer simply called "Bishop Lynch." Ah, there go the Methodists again, I smirked to myself, sure that the host of the interview simply didn't know he was supposed to say "Your Excellency" when addressing a Bishop.
But before I left town, I heard a Catholic Mass on the radio, and it was unlike any Catholic Mass I had heard in quite a while. To have a Catholic Mass with a professional broadcast sound on a high-powered FM transmitter was a first. To have such a broadcast originating from the center of a huge metropolitan area, and not from some neighborhood pirate wires atop a hidden apartment complex was stunning. And to stop at traffic light after traffic light to discover that so many cars were listening with me ... that was the hook that brought me solidly into St. Petersburg after retirement from the Navy. I mean, this simply doesn't happen in "The Bible Belt," in English, in a huge diverse metropolitan city.
But it does here.
The fourth thing I noticed as I was going through a WalMart parking lot, seeing Rosaries and Crosses hanging from many car windows as a popular "hip" thing to do, with no one ashamed to be wearing crosses, even at work, was that here, no one gets noticed for being religions - or for not being religious, for that matter. This was a new experience for me, and I now realize that this is also a giant hub for many world religions of every faith and belief, all the way out into Scientology in the left field corner of Pinellas County to the esteemed Greek Orthodox Church in the North County. Here, I knew, I could be free to be myself, and be as Christian as I like, and no one would even bother to notice. Perhaps the local citizens didn't realize how good they had it here.
The fifth thing I quickly noticed was that for as many strip clubs as there were around here, there were even more Churches. It is not new to me to drive many miles past many Catholic Churches to find one I can find myself most truly at home - I was doing that from as long ago as when I drove from across the street from the very bizarre (to me, at least) St. Mary, Star of the Sea Parish in Key West to St Peter's Church in Big Pine Key, run then and apparently even now by the most energetic Jesus Christ wanna-be I've met in a long time, Father Tony.
In the past, when I became disillusioned with a certain Parish or Priest, as most Catholics seem to do when all priests and whoever sets up the "rules" of local custom in the Parish Council can't be all things to all people, or produce inspiring music instead of a spine-grating sound so bad I'd rather hear shrill grinding sounds from of a dentist's drill, I just quit going to Mass to wait out the storm until at last, something of tragedy or perhaps even boredom and the misuse of idle time forced me back into Mass, hopefully not smelling of alcohol and cigarettes by the time I arrived.
Now, thanks to the dozens and dozens of Churches within driving range of any point in Pinellas County, all I have to do is wait until the assigned Parochial Vicar says Mass in a Parish with a troubled Pastor (or a Priest I find troublesome), or I just roll down the road and try out a new Parish for a while. There is no such thing as a "captive audience" here. Actually, to my surprise, I see many of the same people in several different Parishes, and I know almost all of the local priests here. I am not so sure they know each other. We are lucky here. We have a few Pastors that I can patiently wait out, no matter how long it takes, we have a few Churches that could care less if I (or anyone else) stay or go, and we have more than our fair share, I must admit, of outstanding priests that also seem drawn to the Diocese of St. Petersburg from around the world.
I do intend, in a future Blog, to feature (and hopefully, even interview) some of my favorite local priests. Without a doubt, without hesitation, and without delay, the first will hopefully be Monsignor Thaddeus Malinowski, a retired 3-Star General of the Army Chaplain Corps who was Elvis Presley's chaplain before finding recent fame as Terri Schindler-Schiavo's lonely priest who had very little, if any support from the brother priests, surrounded by dozens of Catholic Parishes, in the center of the Diocese of St. Petersburg. But every priest around here has their own unique story to tell. I am not even sure the Diocese would even allow such a thing, because the fact is in many Parishes when some Parish Secretary reads the General Intentions for the recovery of the mentally ill, they look right into my eyes when doing so. Well, I have made plenty of demands upon the Bishop - perhaps unreasonable and unfair ones since I have been here, and I don't think I could ever apologize enough to this Bishop, express gratitude enough to this Bishop. It took me many long years, but at last, he has taken to the podium, and publically expressed what I had been trying to tell him since soon after I arrived here.
Personally, I hope that His Excellency Bishop Robert N. Lynch has absolutely no idea who I am. As I once told him through his staff, he should not feel that I am mentally unbalanced in my lofty demands of such a Diocese with such a high concentration of priests, Parishes, and crosses hanging from the mirrors in our cars. Through complete ignorance, my unfair demands, and my unrealistic expectations, I told him many times how far off the mark I thought he was, in many areas. It is not that I had not seen him before ... I had met him many times, in fact, and still, I am not sure he ever realizes he had met me.
Well, something remarkable happened, first noticed at about the same time that retired Bishop Thomas Larkin died. The Bishop went through some sort of a transformative experience in his life - to this day I don't know what it was, but it was as sudden and dramatic as Peter throwing away the fishing nets, Saul's conversion, or even Jesus emerging from the Judean Wilderness.
I know that many Catholics not in my region and many non-Catholics elsewhere could care less, on the surface of what I'm about to say, but Bishop Lynch has, for whatever blessed reason, decided that finally, he could not ignore the same observations I had been making about the truth of what was happening behind the safety and security of the Parish walls. My own observations had been a two-fold process that first of all center on the religiously blessed region of many faiths, where on any beach or at any sports event or in any shopping mall anyone who wants to start a friendly conversation about God and Jesus Christ find themselves doing so as naturally as two travelers walking on the Road to Emmaus. Only in corporate secular settings, such as on local radio shows in most markets does one get the same public reaction usually found almost everywhere else in America: Take your religion off the stinking streets, you Bible-thumping fanatic, and leave your Church at Church, and our streets for the rest of us. Or, It's not nice to discuss politics or religion in public- especially with strangers. Or, My home is my Church, and it's between me and God. Or, They don't really want me at Church - they just want my money. Or, I was raised that way, but now I have responsibilities and I'm too busy. Or, the most painful of all, Oh, I was thinking about it before the Priest abuse scandals. Why should I waste my time having them preach to me? I've never molested anyone.
Even so, as I said, I noticed that the public is truly tolerant of public religious discussion here, especially ecumenical (multi-faith) unity across the walls of individual denominations. I think that Spirit FM gets a lot of the credit for this, for they celebrate the Christianity of many musical talents, most of whom are not Catholic. And many of these non-Catholic music artists produce songs that are featured at the popular Teen Life Masses around this Diocese - some of my favorite Masses, especially at San Raphael's and Espiritu Santo. And many youngsters, Catholic and Protestant alike, get together and pray together whenever a popular Christian Music Artist comes to town.
Most of the priests I know here consider their best friends not to be fellow priests, but rather ministers to other faiths. This is one place where different faiths can work together - and they do - in working as one community.
Where we have had problems, and this is the second part of my observations, is within the walls of our Churches, where a trend became almost immediately clear to me, and it only seems to have gotten worse, but for in a few Parishes, and some of these include Christ the King, Our Lady of Lourdes, and only a very few others. In the summer of 2006, on North Reddington Pier, I filmed a one-on-one ... just between me and the camera, to make a short documentary about exactly what it was I was seeing, and what I planned to do about it. It was not well done, I am told, as most viewers commented upon what the Pelicans were doing in the background as they showcased their precision flying team. I used to blame the Bishop for not working hard enough to get 20-40 year olds to Mass, and then Priests for making it such a comfortable experience for the 55+ crowd that the younger generation was not made to feel welcome, and in the end, I think we can all agree, we are all to blame. I told the Bishop of the problems many times, but my own solutions were few and far between, and perhaps unrealistic and unachievable given my limited time and resources.
It was actually Father Argentino or the Bishop himself who first hinted at a change to soon happen in the Diocese of St. Petersburg that it completely transforms every Parish, every Parishioner, every Priest, and most importantly, everyone that is encountered by anyone inside the safe confines of Church walls once they leave.
I did not realize, until I heard Bishop Lynch on Spirit FM from the Cathedral of St. Jude on Sunday, November 25th, just how big this effort is going to be, and how transformative it is going to be. Unlike me, the thinker with only a few fleeing ideas, he has a solid plan to, in the words of Jesus, "make all things new." This will be nothing less than the Church going into a complete 3-year "retreat," where no one will experience anything less than tremendous growth and change, in some ways towards our inner Catholic identities, and in other ways, out to embrace our common love of the Word of God already celebrated by our Protestant brothers and sisters.
I am going to predict that by the time this 3-year project nears completion, you will see a Catholic Church in this town fitting of the religious zeal of those, Catholic and non-Catholic who are outside the Church walls. You will see the 20-40 year olds back at Mass, with their screaming babies, and with the tattoos on their arms visible through their Sunday best, and best of all, you will see the transformative power of a transformed Church at work in helping neighbors - Catholic or otherwise, when they are going through hard times. You will see the hungry fed, and jobs offered to the heartbroken victims of capitalism who want to get back on their feet. Yes, we will always have the poor, but in the end, it will only be the poor who like it that way.
I applaud the Bishop for what he has done. I encourage everyone take a good look at what he plans to do, first by reading his Pastoral Letter (Adobe PDF)
Some - if not most of the non-Catholic traditions will point out that they do not believe in the Catholic Truths of the Eucharist, and based on what they observe when they watch the lives of Catholics streaming out of their Churches to get back to life in the real world ... I really don't blame them. Perhaps it is up to us to prove ourselves by showing the power of the Eucharist in the world first, and then ... by loving others who are not considered lovable, or who are not easy to embrace love because of a bitter heart and spirit ... by really making a difference in the world, then perhaps then we can have the discussion. Personally, I have found that I need this Eucharist, and regularly so. For those of you who have completely balanced lives without such a routine in your life, I must express a perhaps un-Christ-like envy for your ability to live independent of what I seem to need so much just to get by. For now, let's not argue or debate it - for now ... let's simply agree to pray for one another. Even Pope John Paul II, when visiting his would-be assassin, said, "I will pray for you. Will you pray for me?"
In conclusion, the link worth bookmarking and returning to from time to time is The Bishop's Project Page