Cardinal O'Malley meets with students

Dozens of students stood silently as Cardinal Sean O'Malley, leader of the Boston Archdiocese, entered Weston Jenks Honors Library to address invited graduate and undergraduate students Tuesday night. "It has always been a hallmark of his to try to reach out to local churches, colleges, and universities," said Tim Muldoon, director of the Church in the 21st Century, in his introduction. More than 40 students were given the unique opportunity of listening to and speaking with O'Malley, who is now eligible to elect the next pope with others in the College of Cardinals.

Speaking on everything from The Economist to de Tocqueville to Sept. 11, O'Malley spoke about the church's standing in the world today. "We have lived through the 20th century: the bloodiest century in the history of the world," he said . "Most deaths in this century were due to the atheistic ideologies of Nazism and Marxism. There was another danger in the Cold War. The world now faces a new challenge: terrorism … some would like to use religion to manipulate the political system.

"With Sept. 11, the crime was planned in every detail. It was evil; the motivation was revenge. Yet that tragedy revealed heroic people: firefighters, rescue workers, et cetera. The amount of money that was donated to the victims' families from U.S. citizens and from other countries was unprecedented.

"Celebrities aren't always great role models for people. They can be self-indulgent, yet those who ran to Ground Zero to help were truly selfless and self-sacrificing." He spoke of Dorothy Day [author of The Catholic Worker], who experienced living in a tent city after an earthquake, where everyone helped one another. She spent her life trying to recapture that sense of community out of disaster. "After Sept. 11, we experienced what Dorothy Day experienced after that earthquake."

In response to a question about why many students don't attend mass because they don't get anything out of it, he responded, "If you come to church just to be entertained, you'll be disappointed. You can't judge it on how entertaining it is. You need a prayer life to get something out of it."

He also spoke of the sense of community that the Catholic church fosters. "In today's world, people are doing more things alone, but the church calls us to come into a community. Each of us has a vocation, a calling, and we need to determine what that is. Many think of the Catholic church as a church of "No," but the message of the church is really a message of "Yes" - to God, His commandments, and to love," said O' Malley.

"In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells his disciples to 'Love one another as I have loved you,'" he said. "Jesus not only calls his disciples his 'brothers and sisters,' but also the poor, the hungry, the sick, the imprisoned, and the downtrodden. They are also the protoganists of the Gospel. If the world finds this hard to believe, then we're not doing a good job of following it."

"Human fulfillment can only be achieved by making a gift of one's self," he concluded. Students at BC have had a history of following O'Malley's belief that "we have a responsibility to one another," and there is no doubt that they will continue to do so.