M I S S I O N as a J O U R N E Y to H O L I N E S S Br. Sixtus Roslevich, O.S.B. Last March, Sister Elizabeth Castro and her Office for Religious of the Diocese had planned for all of us to spend a day together here at Portsmouth Abbey and Portsmouth Abbey School. It was scheduled for Saturday, March 21, during our school’s spring break. We would have had the whole place mostly to ourselves, including the dining hall, for a Lenten Day of Recollection. You would have loved being on our 500-acre campus on the eastern shore of Narragansett Bay. We all know what happened that week. As the soothsayer says in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “Beware the Ides of March!” Little by little, closings and shutdowns and lockdowns occurred due to the coronavirus, and our Day of Recollection was one of the first of many events to be canceled. I’d like to thank Sister Elizabeth for her patience and perseverance in finding a way for us to be together this afternoon in a safe and healthy manner, almost one full year later. I met some of you in person on October 22, 2019, at Bishop Tobin’s Meeting of Major Religious Superiors in Pawtucket. There was only enough time for the briefest of introductions among the group so, to maybe refresh your memory, I’ll tell you that my name is Brother Sixtus Roslevich. I am a Benedictine monk of the Saint Louis Abbey in Missouri, and I am definitely not a major religious superior. I was merely a pinch hitter that day. I moved to Portsmouth in July 2019 to join two of my Saint Louis confreres in an effort to maintain the life and liturgy of the monastic community, both in the school and in the monastery. We now number 8 monks in the Portsmouth house. By most standards, I am a late-vocation, having entered the St. Louis Abbey in 2005 at age 52. I was born in Northeastern Pennsylvania and had a pretty typical blue-collar upbringing in a very small town in the middle of the anthracite coal region. Eventually, two-thirds of my life were spent in the Midwest, in St. Louis, where I had moved for work shortly after college. With your permission and patience, I’d like to begin this afternoon by relating some of the earliest memories of my childhood years there, as a cradle-Catholic boy of the pre-Vatican-II 1950’s. In retrospect, the single word which seems to resonate repeatedly, and most persistently, throughout those earliest memories is “mission”, and that is mainly what I’d like to talk to you about this afternoon. And not just about mission – with a period – but about the concept of mission – with hyphens. It is mission-as-a- 1 journey-to-holiness around which I’d like to frame my ideas today. Mission-as-a- Journey-to-Holiness. I hope that by the end of this conference you’ll understand that, for me, and perhaps for many of you, mission can indeed be equated with an overarching theme of holiness. I’d like for all of us to think about what sort of mission each one of us is on right now, during this time of political, racial, economic and social unrest in our country. There’s no way we can ignore any of those issues in our work within our human society. This past week I was our community’s reader. The second reading at Matins, or Vigils, on Thursday was from a homily by Karl Rahner on St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Chapter 12, Verses 1-21. The Jesuit, Father Rahner, writes: “When Paul says that everyone has his own gift, his own vocation, it is a truism. Every individual has his own quite particular character and experience, his own history, his own age, this or that sex, his own education and training, his own quite definite place in human society and – as Paul says – in the Church of God. But are we always well content with this place, this vocation and mission?” A different Matins reading several weeks ago celebrated the life of an American woman beatified in 2005 by Pope Benedict XVI. You might recall the story of St. Marianne Cope of the Congregation of Franciscan Sisters of Syracuse NY. She answered a call in 1883 to move to Hawaii to minister to lepers. What a special gift St. Marianne must have had in order to be able to spend 35 years in the midst of such suffering and misery. In his address to those gathered in Rome for her beatification, the pope said that her “life was one of profound faith and love which bore fruit in a missionary spirit of immense hope and trust.” Think back to how that tiny seed of your own vocation was first planted by the Sower – capital “S” – with the help of the Holy Spirit and nurtured over the years and decades by your family and friends and mentors. Then give some thought to your calling. Or as Rahner says, your “own quite definite place in human society,” your vocation and your mission. Now, you get to choose your own metaphor here. How does your own personal mission fit into the picture, the painting, the jigsaw puzzle, or even the crazy quilt, if you will, of your own institute, congregation, convent, monastery or diocese? We’ll try to explore how all of that hard work, the perseverance, the blood, sweat 2 and tears, boil down to being just the tiniest piece of brightly colored thread in the larger tapestry of the life of our church and its history. My talk for you today might be a bit long to be referred to as a fervorino, as the Italians would call a short religious pep talk. And on the other hand, this will be far too short to be considered an autobiography or a memoir. But I do want to set one thing straight from the beginning: even though I consider myself to be a cradle Catholic, full disclosure here, my family did not own a cradle. I always had a proper bed to sleep in. Granted, there were times which, for various reasons I won’t go into, my 3 younger brothers and I slept in the same double bed, four of us, side-by-side and crossways. At that early age, I wasn’t yet familiar with the works of Charles Dickens, but in retrospect I now know it sounds like a scene out of Oliver Twist. But by my proudly claiming identity as a cradle-Catholic, you will maybe have a more endearing and enduring takeaway from all this. The first church I attended was the mission parish of St. Francis of Assisi, about a 6-block walk from our house on Maple Street in West Hazleton, Pa. Maple Street was actually an alley, but calling it Maple Street sounds more nostalgic. Norman Rockwell it wasn’t. St. Francis was founded in 1939 as a mission outreach of St. Gabriel’s, the bigger Irish parish in Hazleton, the bigger town to the east. Twenty years later, around 1959, St. Francis was now independent and on firm enough footing that it was able to found its own mission of St. Michael the Archangel Parish, a few miles away in Harwood. Our two priests, one old and Irish, the other young and Italian, ministered to both parishes. So, you see, I was aware of this word mission being bandied about a lot in conversations both at home and in the priest’s sermons quite early on. I should tell you at this point that there were many mixed marriages in my hometown. What it meant was that the bride might be from St. Gabriel’s, the Irish church on the South Side, while the groom might belong to the Holy Trinity Slovak church on the other side of town. I guess that even makes me the offspring of a mixed marriage since I had a Polish father and a Slovak mother. The actual physical church building of my childhood was not designed to be a church. It began life as a company store catering to the anthracite coal miners of an earlier time who worked for the Lehigh Navigation & Coal Company. When I mentioned this term ‘company store’ to my confreres recently, those of a certain age recalled a song recorded in 1955 and made popular by Tennessee Ernie Ford. Titled “Sixteen Tons,” the refrain ends with the line, “I owe my soul to the company store.” One source which I fact-checked for this talk actually called St. 3 Francis of Assisi, my boyhood church, a “storefront chapel”. Sadly, that makes it sound like the Salvation Army Mission from the musical Guys and Dolls. Thinking about it now, it was an odd place to begin one’s faith journey, in a mission church, in a rundown building that once housed coal baron moneychangers and usurers, usurers who practiced usury in the moral sense of the word. At that young age, my brothers and I didn’t give it much thought. For me, at least, being the oldest of four boys, that church sanctuary provided the true sanctuary I needed from an alcoholic and abusive father. It was a safe space. It was in that building that Fr. Burnett, the younger priest, taught us boys how to put a decent spiral spin on a football pass while scrimmaging with us in the large open meeting room on the second floor.