The cover story for our August issue, by Katie Rutter, takes a look at the opioid crisis that plagues much of the Midwest, yet her article deftly juggles the epidemic and a faith-based approach to addressing it.

Counselors and other medical professionals have their work cut out for them. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, more than 130 people in the United States die after overdosing on opioids every day. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that the total economic burden of prescription opioid misuse alone in the United States is $78.5 billion annually.

Along with Rutter’s article is an excerpt from one of our best-selling titles, Breathing Under Water, by Richard Rohr, OFM, who shows us how the Gospel-infused 12 Steps can help people ravaged by addiction.

If you or a loved one struggle with this disease, please know that we at Franciscan Media are praying for you.

Is our faith, our spirit, a lively witness to others? Does our presence point others to Jesus—as St. John the Baptist’s did in his lifetime?

If you were playing a game of association, you might be asked, “What is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear John the Baptist?” Do you see images of an ascetical man with straggly hair, clothed in skins? Do you hear a stirring call to conversion? Or perhaps you have an instant picture of John baptizing crowds of penitents at the Jordan.

John has, after all, been the subject of such famous artists as Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Caravaggio, Donatello, Michelangelo and Titian. So our imaginations have been primed. But what do the four Gospels tell us of John?

Just as each Gospel writer has a unique purpose for writing and favorite themes that are woven through the text, each author portrays John the Baptist in a somewhat different light. Mark focuses on John as the forerunner. In Matthew, John is primarily the preacher of repentance. Luke draws our attention to John as prophet, while John’s Gospel presents him as the witness and herald of Jesus.

Each of these images offers the reader particular insights into the role of John the Baptist. At the same time these varied portraits present the reader with key questions for reflection upon one’s own life.

Preacher

With Matthew’s Gospel, John is the preacher of repentance. Here the author includes the content of John’s exhortation: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” (3:2).

The message is twofold. There is a call to repentance, a word that means “to turn around, to change one’s mind and heart.” To repent is not just a matter of expressing sorrow for something. It is to have an entirely new orientation. The second part of John’s message is his proclamation that the kingdom of heaven is near.

Repentance, then, is a response to this nearness. True repentance or turning is always a turning toward the goodness of God, the nearness of God’s grace. It is this turning toward the presence of God that enables one to turn away from wrongdoing. Here Matthew, like Mark, depicts John as a dynamic and influential preacher of true repentance. “At that time Jerusalem, all Judea, and the whole region around the Jordan were going out to him and were being baptized by him in the Jordan River as they acknowledged their sins” (3:5-6).

John makes it clear that baptism is no empty ritual. His baptism signifies a genuine turning in a person’s life expressed in action. In Matthew, there is a confrontation with the Pharisees and Sadducees when John sees them coming to his baptism.

Throughout this Gospel, these Jewish leaders are depicted as those who reject Jesus. Already with the appearance of John the Baptist, Matthew points toward this opposition. His words to them remain a potent challenge to contemporary readers: “Produce good fruit as evidence of your repentance” (3:8). In other words, they must “Give some indication in your lives that your repentance is sincere.”

Genuine conversion or change of heart is always manifest in how one lives. Later in this Gospel, Jesus also uses the imagery of producing good fruit: “By their fruits you will know them” (7:20).

Matthew’s depiction of John the Baptist encourages us to hear anew his twofold message. We might ask ourselves: Where and how are we aware of the nearness of God’s grace? Secondly, how do we turn toward it? Do we experience a change of heart, a reorientation of our values and decisions when we notice God’s presence? What fruits have been produced?

Such reflection can help us to become more keenly aware of grace and of the process of conversion subtly at work in us.

Those of us who enjoy tending plants or gardens know what it is like to wonder if this flower or that plant will actually blossom or bear fruit. Then one day we are delightfully surprised to find tomatoes on our plants or buds on the Christmas cactus. Similarly, we might discover that, if we look closely, there are signs of new fruit in our lives, or at least the inner nudges to bear fruit in a new way.

Prophet

In Luke, John the Baptist is introduced even before he is born. Three scenes in the Infancy Narrative give attention to John’s role. In the Annunciation scene with Zechariah, the angel appears to him, promising a son. His words to Zechariah outline the prophetic role of John.

“He will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother’s womb, and he will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God. He will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah” (1:15-17).

At the Visitation, when Mary approaches Elizabeth, Luke describes the baby in Elizabeth’s womb leaping for joy, already responding to the presence of Jesus.

Finally, on the day John is circumcised and named, Zechariah himself is filled with the Spirit and prophesies. In his canticle, he addresses his son, “You, child, will be called prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways” (1:76).

When John is to begin his preaching, Luke uses an expression that is often employed in the Old Testament to emphasize the fact that prophets were moved by God and spoke under God’s influence: “The word of God came to John” (3:2). As in Matthew’s Gospel, John preaches repentance and urges the crowds to produce good fruits. Luke, however, expands upon John’s teaching. The crowds ask what they should do.

John’s response puts him squarely in the tradition of the prophets. He urges them not to do extraordinary feats of fasting, but to have compassion for the poor and to deal justly with their neighbors. They are to share their food and clothing. When specific groups of people raise the same question, his answers are direct and practical.

Tax collectors are told, “Stop collecting more than what is prescribed” (3:13). Soldiers are advised, “Do not practice extortion, do not falsely accuse anyone, and be satisfied with your wages” (3:14). John even dares to speak the truth to Herod, censuring him for marrying his brother’s wife and for all the evil deeds he has committed. Like prophets before him, John suffers imprisonment and death because of his courageous message of truth.

Reflecting upon John as prophet, we might ask ourselves: When are we aware of the Spirit’s power within us? Perhaps imagining ourselves in a prophetic role seems overwhelming for many of us, but with John, we are asked to recognize those moments when the word of God comes to us in a particular way.

What do we do with those nudges, those wake-up calls? In what situations do we speak out or act on behalf of the poor or those who suffer injustice? Whose words and/or example are prophetic for us, urging us to become aware of those things that are within our power to do?

I recently received a note from a friend who knitted her prayers and concern for someone who was chronically ill into a shawl and sent it to her. A few of her friends observed the prayerful knitting and realized that this was something they could also do. The next thing she knew, she was speaking to a group of 40 women who were interested in learning how to become involved in this type of outreach.

We probably all know of individuals whose example has somehow motivated others to visit nursing homes, work in soup kitchens or volunteer with Habitat for Humanity. Perhaps you’ve done a little prophetic nudging yourself!

Witness

The Gospel of John the Evangelist is particularly focused on John the Baptist as witness. In the Prologue of this Gospel, Jesus is understood as the preexistent Word “in the beginning with God” (1:2). He is also described as the light that shines in the darkness.

The role of John the Baptist is seen specifically in relation to Jesus: “He came for testimony, to testify to the light” (1:7). John is the herald, the one who gives witness to Jesus. In each of the Gospels, John the Baptist is portrayed as secondary to Jesus. Jesus is stronger; Jesus is the one whose sandal John is not worthy to untie. Here the evangelist could not be clearer: “He [John the Baptist] was not the light, but came to testify to the light” (1:8).

In this Gospel, John is consistently seen as pointing away from himself and testifying to Jesus. The Prologue summarizes his ministry: “John testified to him [Jesus] and cried out, saying, ‘This was he of whom I said, “The one who is coming after me ranks ahead of me”’” (1:15). Three separate scenes illustrate this truth. In the first narrative, priests and Levites directly ask John who he is. He asserts that he is neither the Messiah nor Elijah. Rather, quoting Isaiah, he identifies himself as the voice of one crying out in the desert, “Prepare the way of the Lord” (40:3).

The next day, when he sees Jesus coming, he uses that voice, crying out, “Behold, the Lamb of God….He is the one of whom I said…” John then says that he came baptizing “that he [Jesus] might be made known” (1:29-31). He recounts the story of Jesus’ baptism as the moment in which Jesus’ identity was revealed to him: “Now I have seen and testified that he is the Son of God” (1:34).

In a third scene, John directly points two of his own disciples toward Jesus. Seeing him walk by, John says, “Behold, the Lamb of God” (1:36). His disciples accept his testimony and turn to follow Jesus.

In the fourth Gospel, Jesus gives special tribute to John’s role as witness. When his opponents seek some basis for believing in him, Jesus reminds the people that they themselves sent emissaries to John, and “the testimony he gives on my behalf is true” (5:32).

Jesus declares that John was “a burning and shining lamp” (5:35). This image invites us to reflect upon the nature of our own lives in relation to Jesus. Is our faith, our spirit, a lively witness to others? Does our presence point others to Jesus?

Throughout the last years of his papacy, John Paul II relied on God to endure his failing health.

It is no secret that Karol Wojtyla, as a young man and even during the early years of his pontificate, was a picture of health, vigor, and vitality. As an athlete skilled in soccer, swimming, canoeing and skiing, he exhibited a great physical presence.

During his papal trip to the United States in 1979, he rode through Manhattan in the back of a limousine with an opening in the roof that allowed him to be visible to the crowd from the waist up. He was in excellent physical condition, waving to the crowds with just the right amount of drama as the vehicle moved slowly along. (This was before the 1981 assassination attempt in Rome and the days of the “popemobile,” with its bulletproof glass protecting the pope.)

These are all reminders of John Paul’s healthier days when he had all the physical stamina and charm any human could want. The pope did regain—for a time—his health and vigor after recuperating from the 1981 assassination attempt.

In the early 90s, however, a series of health problems began to take their toll. In 1992, the pope had colon surgery, involving removal of a noncancerous tumor. The next year he fell and dislocated a shoulder. In 1994, he suffered a broken femur in another fall. An appendectomy followed in 1996. During these years, moreover, a Parkinson-like condition, if not the disease itself, began to reveal its visible effects.

The point of these sobering details is to show that John Paul was clearly entering the part of his life’s journey marked by failing health and suffering.

Describing the Holy Father in the fall of 1998, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger stated: “The pain is written on his face. His figure is bent, and he needs to support himself on his pastoral staff. He leans on the cross, on the crucifix….” Certainly John Paul II was beginning to lean on Christ’s cross in more ways than one.

Bearing Infirmities with Honor

The January 1998 papal trip to Cuba posed a sharp contrast to John Paul’s United States visit in 1979. As a writer for St. Anthony Messenger, who had personally covered both his 1979 USA trip and the Cuba trip of ’98, I had a firsthand experience of the enormous change in the pope’s health. In Cuba the pope’s athletic stamina was gone. His gait was slow and at times shuffling, his speech was often slurred and his hand sometimes trembled.

But frankly, I felt there was something beautiful and noble in the pope’s witness. His courageous perseverance in carrying out his activities as pope, despite his physical afflictions, was a heart-lifting example for all of us. This was, perhaps, doubly true for all those people around the globe who were themselves bearing some cross or affliction. Many of us, faced with the same tests, would be tempted to shrink from public view, as if infirmity were an embarrassment or personal disgrace.

Not so our brother John Paul II! He refused to go into hiding as long as he could effectively fulfill his ministry as pope. He bore his infirmities as if they were badges of honor and opportunities for imitating the courage of the suffering Christ.

His humble, unpretentious and unembarrassed acceptance of suffering was a dramatic form of witness. The pope offered the world a wonderful model for responding with grace to the test of suffering and illness. As Cardinal Ratzinger observed, John Paul II helps us realize that “even age has a message, and suffering a dignity and a salvific force.”

While the pope was in Cuba, this anecdote was circulating. Someone asked the pope if it would be better if he retired. “After all, Holy Father,” the questioner pointed out, “you have trouble walking and your hand trembles.”

“Fortunately,” the pope quipped, “I don’t run the Church with my feet or my hands, but with my mind!”

We cannot be certain of the authenticity of the story, but it captures something of the pope’s spirit—and his ability to respond to challenges with good humor.

Writing about the Meaning of Suffering

Besides being a heroic witness in the face of suffering, Pope John Paul II has often written inspiringly on the subject. In 1984, for example, he published the apostolic letter “On the Christian Meaning of Suffering.” When confronted with suffering, most of us desperately seek answers to the question Why? Why me? Why now? Why in this unexpected form?

The pope, in his letter, states that Christ does not really give us an answer to such questions, but rather a lived example. When we approach Christ with our questions about the reason for suffering, says the pope, we cannot help noticing that the one to whom we put the questions “is himself suffering and wishes to answer…from the Cross, from the heart of his own suffering…. 

“Christ does not explain in the abstract the reasons for suffering,” he points out, “but before all else he says: ‘Follow me!’ Come! Take part through your suffering in this work of saving the world…. Gradually, as the individual takes up his cross, spiritually uniting himself to the Cross of Christ, the salvific meaning of suffering is revealed before him” (26).

In 1993, Pope John Paul II instituted the Annual World Day of the Sick as a way to bring compassion and greater attention to the sufferings of humanity, as well as to the mystery of suffering itself. The event is held on February 11 each year on the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes. The pope explains that the Lourdes “shrine at the foot of the Pyrenees has become a temple of human suffering” (6).

In John Paul’s message for that First Annual World Day of the Sick, he offered these words of comfort to suffering people around the world: “Your sufferings, accepted and borne with unshakeable faith, when joined to those of Christ take on extraordinary value for the life of the Church and the good of humanity” (5).

He also suggested in the same message that suffering can be transformed into something noble and good: “In the light of Christ’s death and resurrection, illness no longer appears as an exclusively negative event,” he said. “[R]ather, it is seen as…an opportunity ‘to release love…, to transform the whole of human civilization into a civilization of love’ (Apostolic Letter Salvifici doloris, 30)” (3).

We cannot really choose to have no pain in our lives, because pain in some form is inescapable. We have no choice about pain or suffering. Sooner or later everyone must face it. Even Jesus and his mother had to undergo pain.

Whether we bear it with love or not, however, is a different matter. We do have a real choice there. We are free to choose “the pain of loving” or “the pain of not loving,” the latter being a pain that is empty and barren—a pain without any redeeming qualities. We know that Jesus and his mother and other heroic witnesses like John Paul have chosen the “pain of loving.” That is, they undergo suffering for the love of God and of humanity, so their pain has rich meaning.

The Pope’s ‘Letter to the Elderly’

In 1999, Pope John Paul II published a “Letter to the Elderly.” Just as earlier in his pontificate the pope often showed a special concern to the youth of the world, so now he shows a similar concern for elderly people, who also represent a very important segment of humanity. Like the pope himself, a good number of elderly people are susceptible to suffering and failing health.

In his comments to the elderly, the pope reveals some of his own sentiments about the challenges associated with aging, failing health and the end of life on earth. He encourages his elderly brothers and sisters “to live with serenity” the years that the Lord has granted to them.

Then, John Paul adds this poignant, personal note: “…I feel a spontaneous desire to share fully with you my own feelings at this point of my life, after more than 20 years of ministry on the throne of Peter….Despite the limitations brought on by age, I continue to enjoy life. For this I thank the Lord. It is wonderful to be able to give oneself to the very end for the sake of the Kingdom of God!

“At the same time, I find great peace in thinking of the time when the Lord will call me: from life to life! And so I often find myself saying, with no trace of melancholy, a prayer recited by priests after the celebration of the Eucharist: In hora mortis meae voca me, et iube me venire ad te—at the hour of my death, call me and bid me come to you. This is a prayer of Christian hope, which in no way detracts from the joy of the present, while entrusting the future to God’s gracious and loving care.

A Prayer for Peace at Life’s End

John Paul concludes his “Letter to the Elderly” with a prayer that expresses well his own faith-filled response to the mystery and test of suffering:

“Grant, O Lord of Life, that we may… savor every season of our lives as a gift filled with promise for the future. Grant that we may lovingly accept your will, and place ourselves each day in your merciful hands. And, when the moment of our definitive ‘passage’ comes, grant that we may face it with serenity, without regret for what we shall leave behind. For in meeting you, after having sought you for so long, we shall find once more every authentic good which we have known here on earth, in the company of all who have gone before us marked with the sign of faith and hope. Mary, Mother of pilgrim humanity, pray for us ‘now and at the hour of our death.’ Keep us ever close to Jesus, your beloved Son and our brother, the Lord of life and glory. Amen” (18).

Weighed down by life, a woman finds respite in her church.

It’s early August and the thermometer has hit 100 degrees. I feel wound tight as a drum—tense with fatigue, with the heat. It’s been a difficult day; what is usually smooth going feels bumpy and rough. The troubles that are always here—an ongoing problem with a coworker, a worry about my son, the terminal illness of my mother-in-law—seem so much harder to bear today.

On my way to get groceries after work, I drive by church and see that one side of the double wooden doors is open. It looks shadowy and quiet inside. It looks restful, inviting. I decide to stop.

Stepping from the air-conditioned car, I find the heat feels so stifling and heavy it hurts to breathe. I think of words from St. Augustine: “Is not the life of man upon earth a trial, a continuous trial? All my hope lies only in your great mercy.”

Taking Refuge

Inside church, I take a generous helping of holy water. I bless myself: “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Water slips down my nose, splashes on my shirt. It feels cool and reviving, like a gift from heaven, a touch of God’s instant mercy.

Two women are kneeling before the altar. Their murmured prayers float toward me like a song of devotion, welcoming me into church. I pause in the vestibule, listening to them, respectful of their presence, their prayers. The women embrace and then leave church through the front side door. I pray for them—that whatever they are praying for, they will be comforted, they will know they are not alone.

I walk toward the altar, as the women before me had just done and as countless others have done. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews writes: “So let us confidently approach the throne of grace to receive mercy and to find grace for timely help” (4:16). How blessed we are with this confidence we have in our God?

How blessed we are to be this “us” that is not alone here?

Sometimes, during difficult times in my life, I’ve felt that the people who gather here—those of us who are drawn together in our mutual need to be close to God—have held me up, held on to me. I’ve felt connected, heart to heart, prayer to prayer.

Here in God’s house, from the small space of our individual lives, we come together in faith. As the Dominican Timothy Radcliffe says, “We tiptoe into a larger space, God’s vastness, whose compassion is beyond our imagination.”

Soaking in God’s Presence

I kneel in a front pew. The breeze, passing through the open windows and front side doors, gently lifts the altar cloth. The way it is moving, it seems as pretty and alive as summer flowers. The palm trees outside are crackling and swishing. On each side of the altar, votive candles flicker beneath the statues of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and our Blessed Mother.

The sanctuary lamp gives off a comforting red glow. It is quiet and still—yet it seems so alive. I think of all the sacred ceremonies that have gone on here: weekday morning Masses, Sunday Masses, weddings.

Just this morning a funeral was celebrated for a 91-year-old man. I think of all the people marching up to Communion, the confessions, the professions of faith, the knees knelt on, the hands folded, the heads bent, the tears cried, the smiles and hugs offered.

It seems to me that all that has been here is here still. It can’t be seen, but as St. Paul says: what can be “seen is transitory, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Cor 4:18). It all stays; nothing is lost. I think of my brother’s funeral, years ago now; my husband’s and my wedding 40 years ago; our son’s Baptism, first Communion, and Confirmation—and all of the other sacred events in the 75-year history of this church. The joy, the grief, the love, and the community that was created then continue.

Such weight, such holy heaviness—layer upon layer of holy happenings.

A Spirit Reenergized

I feel my tension easing, releasing into the weight of every single thing that has happened here, into the love and hope of every prayer, and into the holy sacraments through which Jesus brings us close to “the Father of compassion” (2 Cor 1:3).

Resting here, I feel blessed with God’s gentle presence. I feel how, in the words of the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, “We are wound with mercy round and round, as if with air.” As I leave church on this August day, I pause to make the sign of the cross with holy water. It’s still hot outside, but I feel more capable of coping with the heat, and with everything else that’s difficult as well.

I thank God for bringing me here, for knowing my need and showing me the open door of the church. I pray that with this mercy I have received, I will also be merciful to others in all of the situations and problems that I face.

Our need to be both receivers and givers of mercy is the purpose of Christ’s presence among us. “He, Himself, in a certain sense, is mercy,” says Pope John Paul II. “The truth, revealed in Christ, about God the ‘Father of mercies,’ enables us to ‘see’ Him as particularly close to man, especially when man is suffering.”

This is why, with a lively sense of faith, we are turning “almost spontaneously, to the mercy of God . . . being moved to do this by Christ Himself, who through his spirit works within human hearts.”

I will stop by church another day, I know. And God will be here waiting and will gather me in—as he gathers in each and every one of us—hot, tired, worried, fit, unfit, and in between.

Sometimes we are so attracted to the saints for our own personal reasons that we fail to see how radical they were in their day.

In 1212, if the small Umbrian city of Assisi’s post office had displayed “Wanted” posters, Chiara di Favarone di Offreduccio and Francesco Bernardone might well have been on them. Their crime? Seriously disrupting the social, economic, and religious stability of their native city.

Intervening centuries of veneration for Assisi’s two most famous citizens have obscured for many people how much Clare and Francis challenged the most important foundations and assumptions of their society.

A Religious Challenge

Although in August of 1212, Clare and Francis were personally on good terms with Assisi’s Bishop Guido II, they were objects of great suspicion for many other people. A mere four months earlier, with encouragement from Francis and Bishop Guido, Clare had left her family home under the cover of darkness, leaving the safety of that walled city. She and a maidservant went down the hill to the chapel of Our Lady of the Angels. Francis cut her hair and gave her the clothing of a lay penitent and a simple habit, setting in motion a radically new form of religious life for women. For a very short time, Clare lived as a servant in the Benedictine monastery of San Paolo and later with a group of laywomen at San Angelo in Panzo near Assisi. There were plenty of women’s monasteries nearby, but Clare felt that God was calling her to a different type of religious life.

Clare could have entered a respectable monastery, bringing with her a sizable dowry in land or cash, enabling her to live with other noblewomen in the style to which they had become accustomed. According to conventional thinking, young women without a dowry were clearly not being called by God to religious life. Women from all ranks of society, however, soon joined Clare at San Damiano, a rundown roadside chapel that Francis and others had repaired and that Bishop Guido made available.

In 1206, Francis had shocked the men and women of Assisi by renouncing his inheritance and starting to live out the Gospel via a poor, itinerant lifestyle. By the spring of 1209, he had attracted 11 brothers and received from Pope Innocent III verbal approval for a form of religious life very different from the monasticism that had become standard in Western Christianity.

Monks and nuns for centuries had based their lives on Acts 4:32: “The community of believers was of one heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they had everything in common.”

While honoring that verse, Francis was much more inspired by Jesus’ missionary discourse (Mt 10:1—11:1) with the poverty and itinerancy that it implied. Members of the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) were inspired by the same Scriptures but saw their ministry as serving the Church through sound preaching on doctrine, reinforced by a life of poverty.

Francis and his brothers cared for lepers, their era’s most despised group of Christians, because many people considered this disease just punishment for the sins of those afflicted by it. The admonition “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here” (the sign over the gates of hell in Dante’s Inferno) originally appeared over the main gate of a leprosarium, of which Assisi had two, plus a leper hospital. Before 1215, when Lateran Council IV required that all women religious be cloistered, Clare and her sisters sometimes helped Francis and the friars “show mercy” (Francis’ expression) to women and men suffering from leprosy.

The emphasis that Clare and Francis placed on evangelical poverty aroused still more suspicions in Assisi and nearby areas. Were they and their followers like many other groups that promoted Gospel poverty but ended up being denounced by a Church that had initially encouraged them?

Economic Disruption

“Upward mobility” was pretty much unheard-of in 13th-century Western Europe. People generally expected to remain within the social group into which they had been born. But the times were changing radically as Francis and Clare grew into adulthood.

A feudal society based on land ownership was giving way to a merchant economy based on cold, hard cash and the ability to identify and fulfill new needs of the general population. Pietro Bernardone, Francis’ father and a cloth merchant, may eventually have become the richest man in Assisi by buying land and renting it out. Many merchants, in fact, were richer than nobles with impressive titles but few material resources. In 1198, Assisi’s minores (those not of noble background) led an uprising that resulted in the destruction of the Rocca Maggiore fortress, a symbol of imperial power.

So how did Francis and Clare challenge the economic system? By avoiding land ownership, they opted out of the interlocking relationships that drove the economy. If dowries were not accepted from the women who joined Clare at San Damiano, that meant that women from much more modest economic backgrounds could become nuns there in a new style of monastery.

The nobles—women and men—who joined Clare and Francis experienced a decline in their standard of living after doing so. They sought to live by the work of their hands in a society that generally considered manual labor a curse to be avoided whenever possible.

Begging was considered socially disruptive and contrary to the Bible. Francis and Clare wanted their followers to live from the work of their hands and beg only if absolutely necessary. Caring for lepers generated no income.

By 1228, Clare had secured from Pope Gregory IX the “Privilege of Poverty” (permission not to accept lands to generate income)—but this applied only to San Damiano. Any other Poor Clare monastery would have to secure a similar guarantee on its own.

Popes, cardinals, and bishops were haunted by the fear that becoming Poor Clares might eventually turn noblewomen into paupers. Only two days before she died in 1253 did Clare receive Pope Innocent IV’s approval for her “Form of Life,” the first Rule written by a woman for women religious.

In that regard, Clare posed a much greater threat to Assisi’s economic system than Francis did.

Social Implications

In this topsy-turvy world, the families of Francis and Clare were not originally friends. The Bernardone family (part of the minores) participated in the revolt that forced Clare’s household and other noble Assisi families (the majores) into exile in nearby Perugia for four years. When Clare was a child and a teenager, the people in her household probably spoke very negatively about Francis, his family, and the minores in general.

Traditional monasteries of nuns were needed in a patriarchal society where many men died young in battle or joined monasteries, taking a vow of celibacy. Single women either were looking to become married or had already become widows. Life in women’s monasteries had many of the creature comforts the nuns had enjoyed at home. According to many people, religious conversion was good but was much like recently introduced spices from the East—always used with great moderation!

What Francis and Clare began challenged all that. The baker’s daughter might one day become a Poor Clare abbess, directing the work of a noblewoman nun in charge of that monastery’s laundry. Soon after Clare began a new form of Gospel living, her sister Caterina (known to us as Agnes) joined her. Their other sister (Beatrice) and their mother (Ortolana) eventually joined them. Rich monasteries of women began to ask for a nun from San Damiano to help them follow the example of that monastery.

That Francis could initially have been a spiritual guide for Clare was certainly shocking—almost as much as some friars later seeking spiritual guidance from Clare! In a world where most people held office for life, the possibility of voting out an abbess or general (worldwide) minister was utterly shocking. And yet that would eventually become possible for a Poor Clare abbess and a Friar Minor general minister. People of all social backgrounds became radically equal in Poor Clare monasteries and among the Friars Minor.

Today we generally have a positive attitude about new things, but in the Middle Ages “new” was often linked to whatever was religiously suspect, politically dangerous, and/or socially disruptive.

The “new and improved” tagline would appeal to some people, but for most it would have made as much sense as “square circles.” Clever words, but together what could they mean?

In 1228, Thomas of Celano, the first biographer of St. Francis, wrote: “Men ran, and women, too, ran; clerics hurried, and religious hastened that they might see and hear the holy man of God who seemed to all to be a man of another world. Every age and every sex hurried to see the wonderful things that the Lord was newly working in the world through his servant” (First Life of Francis, chapter 15).

Thomas meant this as high praise of Francis, but many people in his very status-conscious society thought this mixing of social classes was hopelessly idealistic and extremely dangerous.

This egalitarian view was especially true of the Secular Franciscan Order (formerly known as the Third Order of St. Francis), where nobles, bootmakers, seamstresses, and members of every class and occupation sought to live the Gospel in their own way, but after the example of Francis and Clare.

Clare and Francis did not promote change merely for the sake of change. They simply responded to their society’s hunger for deeper conversion to Jesus’ way as recorded in the Gospels. That hunger still continues among us.

The country is struggling with an opioid crisis—but its strongest foothold is in the Midwest. Armed with their faith, these individuals are fighting back.

Ryan Dattilo estimates that he knows at least 100 people who have died from a drug overdose. These people were not just numbers—they were friends, siblings, sons, daughters, and parents. “The drugs take over, and they make you do things that you never think you would do,” explains the 36-year-old Cincinnati resident.

“I would hurt my mom and I would do all these things, but that never meant that I didn’t love my mom. It didn’t mean that I was choosing drugs over her—that drugs were more important. It just meant that I was in the grips of an addiction,” Dattilo says.

In 2017, President Donald Trump declared the opioid crisis a national emergency. While actual usage is impossible to estimate accurately, well over 70,000 people died of an overdose in 2017, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, which is operated by the Centers for Disease Control. Overdoses killed more Americans under 50 years of age than any other cause.

Opioids, a broad category that has come to include heroin, methadone, fentanyl, and some prescription painkillers such as OxyContin, act on receptors in the brain that regulate the body’s pain and reward system. They mimic natural chemicals created to reinforce behavior, which makes these substances extremely addictive.

In the national crisis, West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania are at the epicenter. These three states had the highest rates of death due to drug overdose in 2017, and those rates had increased significantly from the previous year.

Dattilo grew up right in the middle of the epidemic. He became addicted to heroin after a slow transition from alcohol—which he started at 14—to marijuana, and eventually to prescription opioids and crack cocaine. Once in the grips of the addiction, he could not function without regular doses of the drug. When a dealer was not available, or Dattilo did not have the money to spend, he quickly became “dope sick.”

“You feel like you have the flu times 100,” he describes, “diarrhea, fever, clammy skin, achy joints. But you know that once you get what you’re after, you’re going to be fine.” Dattilo is convinced that these withdrawal symptoms keep people chained to substance use even if they want to quit.

“This is a disease,” emphasizes Sandi Kuehn, president of the Center for Addiction Treatment in Cincinnati, the facility where Dattilo ultimately sought help.

“As a disease, it should be treated medically, and the medical piece of it doesn’t necessarily have to be medication, but we should be treating it as a disease. You can’t arrest yourself out of it,” Kuehn says.

The Center for Addiction Treatment is one of the few medical programs accessible without health insurance. For $20, Dattilo received a 30-day in-residence treatment that included a medical detox, support groups, and help with resources such as housing and employment. Most treatment centers cost between $2,000 and $25,000, which is prohibitive for those whose financial resources have been decimated by their addiction.

“I know people who were going to jail on purpose, trying to get into the drug court because they can’t pay for treatment,” Dattilo says. “[And the courts say], ‘We’ll get back to you in six months.’ The reality is people can be dead in six months out here.”

The Bigger Picture

For every person struggling with substance use, there are dozens of family members and friends struggling alongside them. Addiction can have devastating effects on everyone connected to the individual, straining relationships and destroying families.

“We were so far apart, on different pages, with how to deal with it and not knowing how to deal with it,” says Tina Garera, 57, whose marriage was nearly torn to shreds when a loved one became addicted to multiple substances.

Tina and her husband, Tony, have helped found several Northern Kentucky branches of the national support group Parents of Addicted Loved Ones (PAL). In PAL meetings, family members of persons with an addiction come together for camaraderie and mutual support. One particular group meets twice a month in the Diocese of Covington’s Catholic Charities building. The Gareras facilitate group discussions, with as many as 20 people sharing current struggles and offering suggestions to each other.

“We need to be in recovery too,” Tina says, outlining the shame and isolation that confronted their family because of the stigma associated with addiction.

“Except for working, we didn’t go out of the house much. We didn’t take vacations because we had to be there for our loved one,” Tony adds. “[Our family member] started getting better when we started getting better.”

Caring Communities

The Gareras say that the support group meetings—coupled with a divine prompting to return to church and ask God for help—are what ultimately saved their marriage. Unfortunately, many church communities are not welcoming to those struggling with addictions and their families.

“It has to start at the pulpit. It has to start with the pastors and the priests and the deacons,” Tina says. “They have to let families know that it’s OK to talk about this—that it’s going on in this church, and that they have to learn to love people right where they are. I guarantee you, sitting there in that congregation, every single person has been affected one way or the other by this epidemic.”

In West Virginia, where substance use is at its highest, a simple presentation broke the silence and brought about concrete actions, which saved lives.

Ellen Condron, the parish nurse at All Saints Catholic Church in Bridgeport, suggested that her parish host a “community conversation” about substance use in their social hall. A professor of psychiatric nursing at Fairmont State University, she had learned that children were coming to school without food or clean clothes. Addicted parents were simply incapable of tending to their children.

“A lot of the people in our community had no idea how bad it was,” she says. “It was like a third-world country within our community that we didn’t know about.”

“The other day a woman I didn’t know came up to me and said, ‘You have to keep doing what you’re doing,'” Condron recalls. “She gave me a hug and told me about her relative who had been helped and was now drug-free.”

These conversations have led to other bright spots, both large and small, in addressing the epidemic. All of the local schools were provided with washers and dryers so they could wash the clothes of children whose parents wrestled with addiction. Several local churches provide food to these same children on Fridays so that they will have something to eat over the weekends.

Condron, now recognized as a community expert, also met with their representative from Congress about the crisis. Their meeting led directly to the activation of the Office of Drug Control Policy for West Virginia. The office closely follows a model that she and other activists created.

‘I Believe You Can Get Better’

Condron said that church communities already have the power to stem the epidemic. Worshippers just need to “let the spirit guide.

“Within churches, you have a core group of people like we did,” she explains. This group can form the basis for activism: gathering resources, organizing details, distributing information, and finding areas of need.

“We seem to have created a following with what we’re doing. And I think it’s because we support each other and we know that this is important,” she says.

Back in Cincinnati, Kuehn describes a church group that organizes childcare for those who are working toward recovery. “When someone needs to go into treatment, they may not have anyone reliable to watch their children while they are in a residential program,” she says. They vet people in the community who are willing to step in and help addicts with childcare.

These people say, “‘Yeah, I’ll do that for you for a year, because I believe you can get better. And whatever stability I can give your child is something that could affect them, which then could affect, in a positive way, our community,'” Condron says.

Little Things Count

When one person takes action, the ripples of relief are impossible to overestimate. During the worst part of his struggle with addiction, Dattilo was living on the streets. He camped beneath a Cincinnati bridge for three years and had no means of a steady food supply or access to basic hygiene.

“I didn’t see an exit for myself. I knew I deserved better, I knew I wanted better, but I just didn’t know how to connect the dots from A to B to actually get out of there,” he recalls.

On the streets, he came into contact with workers from a local nonprofit called Downtown Cincinnati Inc. In the below-freezing temperatures of January 2018, one of the workers gave him a ride to the treatment center. He was admitted into their residential program the next day.

“I looked like an absolute shell of a man. You look at Tom Hanks in Cast Away—that can give you the mental image of me. I smelled so bad, it was embarrassing,” he says.

Even with new clothes and regular showers, Dattilo said it took time for his hygiene to recover. Some of the other residents at the treatment center avoided contact with him. But it only took one counselor, a woman named AJ, who had herself been in his shoes, to restore his dignity and hope.

“She’s a beautiful lady, and she made me feel welcome. She made me feel like anything is possible. I felt like she was seeing my potential—she wasn’t seeing me as I was. And that is the first person who had believed in me in a very long time, who showed me that there was hope,” Dattilo says.

Dattilo graduated from the center and has been living in recovery ever since. He now works for the very same organization that picked him up off the streets and volunteers as a peer advocate at the Center for Addiction Treatment. Ultimately, he wants to have a job working on the streets, spreading hope to the homeless. When asked how church communities can help those who are struggling with addiction, Dattilo’s request is simple. “Pray,” he says, adding that God’s providence is the reason he is alive today.

“If you feel comfortable enough to stop and have an actual conversation with a homeless person or a drug addict, let them know that Jesus still loves them. Let them know that they are not forgotten about. Let them know that they exist, that they matter, that there’s hope,” he says.

The Gareras and Kuehn echo the same sentiment: In this epidemic, faith matters. Those who embrace spirituality are more likely to recover from their addiction. Those who have a spiritual center are more likely to withstand the stresses that come with having a struggling loved one. Hope is possible: Christ’s people are called to be the light, especially in the darkest depths of despair.

“When society and people walk by you and ignore you every day for a long time, you just really lose your self-worth,” Dattilo recalls from his years on the streets. “If you improve one person’s day, you’ve made that person’s day,” he continues. “That changes the world realistically. You made life better for one human being.”

The Opioid Crisis at a Glance

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), more than 130 people in the United States die every day from opioid overdose. “The misuse of and addiction to opioids—including prescription pain relievers, heroin, and synthetic opioids such as fentanyl—is a serious national crisis that affects public health as well as social and economic welfare,” the site reports.

Below are more statistics from the NIDA.

• 21 percent of patients prescribed opioids for chronic pain misuse them.
• 8 percent develop an opioid use disorder.
• An estimated 4 percent who misuse prescription opioids transition to heroin.
• About 80 percent of people who use heroin first misused prescription opioids.
• Opioid overdoses increased 30 percent from July 2016 through September 2017 in 52 areas in 45 states.
• The Midwestern region saw opioid overdoses increase 70 percent from July 2016 through September 2017.
• Opioid overdoses in large cities increased by 54 percent in 16 states from July 2016 through September 2017.

Patron Saint of Addicts

In June 1979, then-Pope John Paul II visited the cell in the Auschwitz concentration camp where St. Maximilian Kolbe—prisoner 16670—was confined. Kolbe, he proclaimed, is “the patron saint of our difficult century.” It was not until three years later, though, that he officially canonized the Franciscan, who had given his life for a fellow prisoner.

The pope’s words could not have been more prophetic for our world today. The struggles with addiction that are currently ravaging our world are calling out for a spiritual guide. That guide is Maximilian Kolbe.

The saint is the patron saint of those suffering from addiction, perhaps due to his death on August 14, 1941, following a lethal injection of carbolic acid at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Kolbe suffered more than 15 days of torment before succumbing to that lethal injection. He died on August 14, 1941, at the age of 47, a martyr of charity. Pope Paul VI declared Father Kolbe Blessed on October 17, 1971, and Pope John Paul II canonized him a saint on October 10, 1982. St. Maximilian is the patron saint of families, prisoners, journalists, political prisoners, drug addicts, and the pro-life movement.