by Joseph Nangle, OFM
Pax Christi USA 2023 Teacher of Peace
This kind [of demon] can only come out through prayer and fasting.
Mark 9:29
The Season of Lent this year raises two considerations: The story of Jonah in the Hebrew Scriptures and the virtue of solidarity in Catholic Social Teaching.
Jonah Is the disobedient prophet who tried to escape the Lord’s command to confront the wicked city of Nineveh by sailing off to Tarshish in a boat. A storm nearly wrecked the boat, Jonah was thrown overboard, and wound up inside the whale. He finally accepted his prophetic calling and the rest is the well-known conversion story of Nineveh.
For too long the popular catechesis around this penitential season has been confined to individual conversion. “Giving up something for Lent.” (We forego sweets thinking they are not good for us anyway and but might help us lose weight.) This has been seen as what Lent means; no wider context. Fortunately, in recent years, particularly after Vatican II, our approach to Lent has expanded somewhat to include “prayer and almsgiving.”
However, Lent still appears as a personal religious opportunity. There seems to be nothing of a much broader reason for observing these six weeks except as preparation for their dramatic final days – the Triduum of Holy Thursday, Good Friday and the Easter Vigil. And to be honest, isn’t it often the case that somewhere along this six-week slog, we tend to let up on the disciplines of the season? We need a more vigorous rationale for them.
The evils which Jonah confronted in Nineveh are described as “social evils” and listed in detail throughout the second chapter of the book of Jonah. They have a direct bearing on these Lenten weeks.
Without taking the Noah analogy too far, can it not be said that the United States has enormous social sins to answer for and that we need prophets to speak in God’s name to this modern Nineveh? Therefore, Lent 2024.
In this light, Jonah’s call presents a much broader Lenten challenge. It consists in an ongoing understanding that we are called to be the prophets of today in the “city” of the United States. We speak to our society through countercultural Lenten observances like spending quiet time in prayer and reflection. We connect acts of self-denial to the horrific realities of human degradation, too often aided by our country’s sense of exceptionalism and entitlement. We examine our national lifestyles in the light of major impoverishment worldwide. We join organized efforts to call out these national sins. This understanding of Lent gives it total meaning.
The second consideration as Lent begins is solidarity. Read the following paragraphs in the context of the season of Lent about to begin.
Insistence on the common good has been the hallmark of Catholic Social Teaching since this “new grace” in our Church’s thinking appeared in 1891. Nearer to our own times St. Pope John Paul II issued a social encyclical on this subject, Solicitudo rei Socialis (On Social Concerns) in December 1987. It has been called “the solidarity encyclical.” In it he affirms that “[s]olidarity is undoubtedly a Christian virtue.” (#40) The pope goes on to say that solidarity “is not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people both near and far. On the contrary, it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good…” (#38)
Pope Francis has placed the virtue of solidarity in the context of the COVID pandemic. “It has highlighted our interdependence; we are all linked to each other for better or worse.” He goes on to say: “[T]his interdependence does not always transform into solidarity… Solidarity is rooted in the truth that God created all human beings and created the earth as well… it treats both with respect but acts to help when one is in peril.”
Attention to the virtue of solidarity is self-evident as a Jonah-like Lenten practice. We do not have to look far to see whom Pope Francis is referring to as objects of this practice: All of our fellow human beings whether near or far, especially suffering populations and those places where the United States is the aggressor or the enabler.
Joe Nangle OFM is a Pax Christi USA Ambassador of Peace and the 2023 Pax Christi USA Teacher of Peace. As a member of the Assisi Community in Washington, D.C., he is dedicated to simple living and social change. Joe also serves as the Pastoral Associate for the Latino community at Our Lady Queen of Peace, Arlington, Virginia.