Social media can be a nasty place for Catholics.
Much of what is posted about the fath online is negative, critical and often unfair.
Yet sometimes, it can be a very positive environment.
One such example this week came in the form of a post on Facebook page ‘Humans of New York’.
The popular page regularly asks people from New York to speak about their lives, with an accompanying photograph. The format has spawned many copycats but the original page still holds a very authentic quality that allows it to stand out from others.
A photo of a New York Dominican priest this week has gone viral, garnering hundreds of thousands of likes.
The priest tells a particularly beautiful bittersweet story of a child who was sick and wanted a doll for Christmas.
You can read it below:
“From all sour faced saints, deliver me O’ Lord. I don’t want to be with a grouch, a crab, a crocodile in a moat. The grumps are a small minority. But they’re vocal. Yes, the grumps are vocal. They have unresolved things, maybe from their childhood. They’re not disconnected from God. But they’re wrestling with him. Not a bad thing, mind you. Not a bad thing. But I want to hang out with people who enjoy life. At home I have a sunshine file; it’s just a plastic box. Inside are all the letters people have written me over the years: teenagers in the youth group, widows who lost their husbands. People who I was able to make a difference in their life. For two years I was chaplain on the children’s ward of the cancer hospital. What can you say? You can’t explain why some things happen. Only that it’s a mystery. And a mystery is reality, imbued with God’s presence. One Christmastime there was a ten-year old girl from Ireland, dying of leukemia. All this girl wanted was a Cabbage Patch Doll. Ugliest doll you’ve ever seen in your life, seventy-five dollars. Seventy-five dollars! And sold out everywhere. The mother told me:’ I’ve looked in every store.’ That same day a family from my parish asked what I wanted for Christmas. I say: one Cabbage Patch Doll, and two walkie talkies. They said: ‘Father, are you sure?’ I told them: ‘Yes I’m sure. I was a kid once too!’ The Cabbage Patch Doll went to the little girl. Then I gave one walkie-talkie to her, and one to her twin brother. So they could speak while she was in isolation. After she passed away the mother wrote me a letter. I keep it in my sunshine file. It said: ‘Those walkie-talkies were the best medicine she ever had.’”
The responses were overwhelmingly positive, with many praising the priest as an example of Jesus Christ.
Interestingly, many praise the line ‘You can’t explain why some things happen. Only that it’s a mystery. And a mystery is reality, imbued with God’s presence’, which is a quote from Pope Paul VI. And the opening line is a truncated version of a quote from St. Teresa of Avila, one of our greatest saints and a Doctor of the Church.
Perhaps the church should stop trying to reinvent the wheel as it is doing with many of its Synod related stunts and just be normal and nice.