Holy Week: When the human spirit soars

By Patricia Kasten
Compass Associate Editor

As we begin Holy Week, we once again follow Christ along his way to the cross.

We reflect again upon "man's inhumanity to man" which allows average people to do truly cruel things - soldiers to taunt and beat a helpless victim, government officials to condemn the innocent, a crowd mentality shaping normal people into a mob seeking blood, fear making friends betray and abandon friends, and stubbornness preventing religious leaders from seeing God standing before them.

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And yet Holy Week also shows us the greatness of the human spirit that happens when people allow God to work in them: the women of Jerusalem weeping over a condemned man; the few disciples who risk execution themselves to stand at the cross; the dying thief who refuses to join in bullying and taunts; a centurion recognizing God in a dead man; those who approach Pilate to ask to bury a criminal's body; and, in popular tradition if not Scripture, Veronica offering her veil.

The church is meant to strive for that greatness that is imparted by grace, to imitate Christ revealing the kingdom in the world. The church is, in part, still a human institution and its members are prone to the same weaknesses: fear, stubbornness, condemnation and a crowd mentality. And yet, the church is also united to Christ and when it allows the grace of God to work within it, the glory of resurrection shines through as we walk with others along their ways to the cross.

Just a few examples from our own local church:

• St. John Parish in Green Bay, risking government reprisal and neighborhood taunts to shelter, on average, three dozen of the least of our brothers each night this winter. And the shelter volunteers who provide food, clean clothes and a friendly ear there;
  
  
• St. Joseph Church in Appleton doing the same for its area homeless by offering a warming shelter in the parish's gathering space;
  
  
• St. Willebrord Church in Green Bay opening its community center to more than 100 seniors and those with disabilities who were displaced from their low-income apartments by a fire in the early hours of March 5 - and housing 30 of these people for two nights;
  
  
• St. Patrick Parish in Menasha, and Fr. Carr's Place 2B in Oshkosh, offering free Easter meals to those who have no place to spend the holiday;
  
  
• Catholic Charities in Green Bay teaming up with AARP volunteers to offer free tax preparation help for the elderly and those with disabilities;
  
  
• Religious education students at Holy Rosary Parish in New Holstein, who have spearheaded efforts to get a mammogram machine and a bus for a clinic in Honduras. (Now they are looking for a donated van);
  
  
• The mission group from St. Raphael Parish that just returned from a medical mission trip to Nicaragua.

The list goes on and on. And that's just in our diocese. There are nearly 200 dioceses in the United States. And thousands more around the world.

Each of them is a local church, made up of average human beings - with all our innate potential to choose good or evil, life or death.

God offers each of them - and all of us - the choice to walk with Christ along the way to the cross, or to turn away.