St. Benedict the Moor Parish

Thank you and congratulations to everyone who participated in our listening session with Bishop Mark Eckman on November 3. It was a meaningful opportunity to reflect together on the works of mercy, to recognize the good already being accomplished through our parish community, and to consider where Christ may be calling us to extend our ministry.

I was especially encouraged by the many ways our parishioners are already putting their faith into action. Through ministries and partnerships such as our Food Pantry, the Jubilee Kitchen, St. Vincent de Paul, Healthy Beginnings, AJAPO, and St. Benedict the Moor School, we are helping to address the spiritual, material, educational, and social needs of our neighbors. Just as importantly, many parishioners practice the works of mercy quietly, through personal acts of generosity, accompaniment, encouragement, and service that seldom receive public recognition.
 
The listening session reminded us that our parish is not beginning its ministry of mercy from nothing. We are building upon a living tradition of service.
 
But the conversation also challenged us to look beyond those we already serve. Who remains invisible to us? Who is living in isolation, struggling with homelessness, recovering from addiction, returning from incarceration, or facing the burdens of poverty and displacement? What about young adults searching for community, immigrants seeking belonging, families under tremendous pressure, or elderly neighbors disconnected from parish life?
 
These questions connect directly with the three-part bulletin series, The Church in the City, which ran in our parish bulletin from August 30 - September 13.
 
The central argument of that series is simple: The city is not merely the setting in which the Church carries out its mission. The city itself is our mission territory. We must learn to recognize its people, neighborhoods, possibilities, and wounds. Click here to read the ​series, The Church in the City.
 
Yet the challenges of urban ministry are far greater than anything one parish, however dedicated, can address alone.
 
That is why collaboration among the parishes of our Central Deanery matters. Our ten parishes possess different resources, histories, experiences, and gifts. Rather than expecting each parish to do everything, we should identify our distinctive strengths and coordinate our ministries to meet needs that cross parish boundaries.
 
St. Benedict the Moor, this includes our vocation to evangelization through inculturation and Black Catholic spirituality, while participating fully in the Church's wider mission throughout Pittsburgh.
 
Our task now is to move from listening to discernment and from discernment to action. We should identify where our ministries are effective, where important needs remain unmet, and where partnerships could make our efforts more fruitful.
 
Above all, I hope we will remember that the works of mercy are not simply programs we administer. They are encounters with persons, each possessing dignity, gifts, hopes, and a story worth hearing.
 
Thank you to Bishop Eckman, our ministry leaders, those who seek to fulfill their baptismal vows through service, and everyone who contributed to this important conversation. May it become another step toward the parish God is calling us to become.

---

This week I saw The NAM: Boys of the Bamboo, a production by New Horizon Theater written and directed by Layon Gray. It’s playing at Attack Theater in Lawrenceville through November 15. The play stayed with me long after it had ended, and I encourage you to go.
 
The play follows five Black men held as prisoners of war in Vietnam in the early 1970s. Ironically, their captors call their prison “the palace.” The men come from Harlem, Detroit, Watts, Georgia, and each one brings his own history and his own way of being a man. What they share is one longing: to go home.
 
Live theater offers something a screen doesn’t have. In that room you realize that the actors feel your attention and you feel theirs. You aren’t only watching a story. You become part of the story.
 
The play raises questions that belong in the heart of every Christian.
 
The first is about memory. One prisoner has decided that to survive he must forget his family and the people he loves, because remembering them would make the cage unbearable. Another insists on the opposite. His memory of family and friends, and the food they shared, keeps him alive. Then a new prisoner arrives, young and full of talk and memories about home, and the old question opens up again. Should they let themselves long for home, or is that longing too dangerous?
 
Anyone who has grieved, waited, or suffered knows this tension. Desire can draw us forward, or it can show us painfully how much we have lost. Hope can sustain us, or we fear it may break us. The play doesn’t pretend the choice is easy. Each man has to decide how he will survive.
 
The second question is what happens to us when we are confined with others. The cage that threatens these men with isolation and despair also becomes the place where they build a brotherhood that might outlast the prison. They choose to protect one another, to carry one another, and to stay faithful to one another. Something like communion grows in the most unlikely soil of that prison. The play demonstrates how solidarity is learned, and sometimes the person who learns it last shows it most fully.
 
We are a people who remember. At every Mass we hear, “Do this in memory of me.” Our memory doesn’t have to be a burden that crushes us. It is the root of our hope, because we remember a God who has already broken open the tomb. We are pilgrims too, longing for home.
 
See The Nam. Bring a friend, especially a veteran or someone who has lived through a long separation. Talk about it afterward and ask each other: What do I remember? What do I hope for? Whom has God given me to carry, and who carries me along the way?
 
Attack Theatre, 212 45^th St, Pittsburgh PA 15201; Phone: 412.281.3305
 
Ages 13 and above. Fridays: 8:00 PM; Saturdays: 4:00 PM and 8:00 PM; Sundays: 4:00 PM. Special Veterans Day Performances on November 11: 1:00 PM and 8:00 PM. Tickets: $25–$40
 
In Christ,
Fr. Matthew Hawkins

There is a particularly bitter image making the rounds in conversations about automation: workers unknowingly training the very systems that will replace them — "building our own coffins," as one commentator put it. Whatever the economic reality turns out to be, the wound underneath that image is not mainly economic. It touches something deeper: whether our work, and by extension our lives, are valued for what they contribute or merely for what they produce.

Our faith holds a different vision of work than the marketplace does. Work is not simply an input to be optimized for output. From the first chapters of Genesis, human beings are given work as a share in God's ongoing creation—a form of stewardship, a form of self-gift, a way of participating in something larger than a paycheck. When labor gets reduced to raw material for someone else's algorithm, something more than income is at stake. Dignity is at stake, because a person has slowly been redefined as a resource rather than a co-creator.
 
This is where it's worth being honest about a subtler danger hiding inside all our talk of convenience and automation: the difference between freedom from something and freedom for something. We are constantly offered freedom from labor, from friction, from the discomfort of a hard task or an unresolved question. That sounds like liberation. But the freedom that actually forms a human soul has always been freedom for — for the good, the beautiful, and the true, exercised precisely through real effort, real limitation, real cost. A people taught only to chase freedom from work will not know how to grieve its loss, because they will have already been told the loss is a gift.
 
Whatever changes come to how we work, our task as a parish is to keep insisting — gently, persistently — that no person's worth is reducible to their output, and that real freedom was never the absence of demands on us. It is what we do with the demands we choose.
 
For reflection: Where in your own work or vocation do you find meaning beyond mere output? Is there a task this week you could approach as a gift offered rather than a burden endured?

---

As followers of Jesus Christ, we are called to be peacemakers in a world too often torn by violence. From the earliest centuries of the Church, some Christians have discerned a vocation to conscientious objection—refusing to participate in war or violence because of the Gospel's command to love our enemies.
 
In recent years, the Ben Salmon, No Just War Registry for Conscientious Objectors has been established to help Catholics bear public witness to the Gospel of peace. Named for a Catholic who refused to fight in World War I and wrote a powerful critique of just war theory, the registry allows individuals—especially young people—to formally declare their commitment to Christian nonviolence. This can serve both as a spiritual testimony and, if ever needed, a legal aid in the event of a future military draft.
 
As pastor, I affirm the right of Catholics to conscientious objection, which is supported by both the Catechism of the Catholic Church and statements from the U.S. Bishops. While the Church has long taught the criteria for a just war, it also respects the right of the individual conscience formed in prayer and fidelity to Christ.
 
If you—or someone you love—wishes to learn more about conscientious objection or would like to register their beliefs in accordance with the Gospel call to peace, please contact the parish office. We will be glad to assist in this process, offer spiritual support, and help you discern your path with integrity and courage.
 
Let us continue to pray for peace, and for the grace to be instruments of God's mercy in our troubled world.
 
Fr. Matthew