Easter Season

         The Easter Season continues for some weeks so it’s fitting to recall some of the struggles of the players involved in the weeks following the Passion of Christ and his return to his Father. (I went to a Jesuit high school so I know about these things.) First there is Peter who betrayer his best friend, Jesus.  For days Peter stayed hold up out of fear for the local Jewish religious authorities who had Jesus tried and condemned and insisted on his murderous execution.  Jesus meets him by the water’s edge.  I imagine they had a lot to talk about.  Can you imagine Peter’s tears?  His words?

          Then there are those religious authorities who were gloating over their success in having that dangerous man Jesus wiped out.  After all, Jesus’ way of seeing the world, his preaching and actions seemed so alien to their compulsion to maintain the status quo.  Their fear of anything new and different frightened and threatened their religious purity.  They needed at least to silence him but better to have him executed.  And at no time did those religious authorities allow Jesus to speak, to defend himself.

          At no time was Fr. Julio ever able to speak and to defend himself in front of modern local and provincial religious authorities.  When some board members, never happy with his or any Jesuit’s appointment as president, could not silence him legally, they turned in the dead of night to religious authorities to carry out their nasty act.  Such an action is what thinking people expect from Iran and North Korea.  It is that narrow and dysfunctional mindset and behavior that troubles so many alumni and friends of the college.  Do these religious authorities or new administrators think we are so foolish as to believe their actions helped the college?  Or helped to model for students and neighbors an honest, legal, ethical – need I say moral – behavior?

          Without tears shed as Peter shed tears, the religious authorities keep the college shackled.  Without those tears Wheeling College will remain under populated, unable to attract alumni dollars and will ultimately surface to be the first of the 28 Jesuit colleges to be cut loose.

Larry Catraro