Some of you may have seen the article in the Thursday,
December 9 edition of the New York Post. It is one of the saddest things I
have ever read. It is headlined, "Boy lived with dead mom for
month."
Every day for a month, Travis Butler got up and left the house for
school as if nothing was wrong.
But inside, the 9-year-old Memphis boy harbored a terrible secret - his
mother was dead.
Terrified he would be placed in foster care if he told anyone, the
fourth-grader lived with his mother's corpse for 33 days.
"I just don't know how that baby survived in there for a month
with that smell," said family friend Dorothy Jeffries.
"It was the saddest thing I have ever seen in my life."
Travis' heart-wrenching ordeal began Nov. 3, with the death of his
30-year-old mother, Crystal Wells.
The boy covered her body - lying on the living-room floor - with her
coat and placed sheets of notebook paper over her face.
The fourth-grader fixed his own meals, living on frozen pizza, cereal
and soup - with a big frozen pizza for Thanksgiving dinner.
When he ran out of food, he walked to the grocery store and bought more
with money his mother had left in the apartment.
He caught the school bus and went to class every day and came home, did
his homework and watched TV at night.
He signed his mother's name on his report card - and even cut his own
hair.
Mrs. Jeffries and her husband, Nathaniel, found the body Monday when
they went to the apartment after being unable to contact the mother.
Travis answered the door.
"At first he said his mother was at work and wouldn't let us
inside," Mrs. Jeffries said. "When we kept asking he finally
just broke down and said, 'Mama can't talk anymore because she got really
sick and I think she is dead.'"
She said Travis begged them not to call the cops because he was
terrified of being placed in a foster home.
"When the ambulance came he ran to his mother because he didn't
want her to be taken. I will never forget that sight," she said.
Travis' teacher, Pamela Lawson, said he was a normal child, "not
extremely shy or extremely outgoing."
He never missed any days at school and was never tardy, she said.
That has to be, for any one of us, as sad a story as we have ever read.
I do not repeat it to you to engage in any kind of criticism whatsoever.
That mother obviously did her best and died trying. This young boy had to
have been terribly frightened, completely traumatized and was simply
trying to continue living.
I read this story, however - with sympathy with all parties involved -
from the perspective that this is Pro-Life Sunday. This is the Sunday on
which we commemorate the tragic Supreme Court decision known as Roe v.
Wade and emphasize the sacredness, the value of every human life. We do
not do this to criticize anyone. We know the difficulties crisis
pregnancies can bring. This is one of the reasons why, many years ago, I
made a promise which I have tried to keep faithfully ever since: any one,
of any race, color, religion or background threatened by the possibility
of abortion, not knowing which way to turn, can turn to the Archdiocese of
New York. We will give financial help, medical help and do everything that
we can to help save the life of that child and the future of the mother.
That prevails today after all these years.
We want to go beyond that now and think in terms of the reality of what
is happening and what we must do in response. This story just read, I
think, is illustrative of how readily we can put aside the reality of
human life. As I read this article, I had to wonder how often this young
boy, 9 years of age, had heard just casually on television or elsewhere
about abortion? The term may have meant little to him but the reality
possibly had some impact - that thousands, that hundreds of thousands are
literally put to death every year in our country alone.
Travis had a difficult way of trying to deal with his problem. If it
sounds callous to talk about "dealing with" his problem, since
his problem was his deceased mother, he nonetheless tried to cope with it,
indeed to the degree possible by ignoring it. Is this what is done in our
country, simply ignoring the problem?
There is a large number, a very gratifying number of us here. Because
you are who you are and because the Knights of Columbus are who they are,
to some degree we get at the problem, we do our best, we pray, we
sacrifice, we speak to others. Many of you will go to Washington for the
March for Life. There will be possibly 100,000 people in Washington. But
we are a fraction still, aren't we? Of course that should discourage us.
Rather, that should give us a deep sense of who we are and of what we can
accomplish, small as our numbers may seem. We have to keep praying. We
have to keep working. Above all, we can not let ourselves get discouraged.
Unfortunately, in so many homes children are reared to know, in
actuality, that a mother is pregnant and then suddenly the pregnancy seems
to disappear. Today, horror of horrors, they even become aware of what we
have now come to recognize as the final moments of pregnancy. When a child
is actually ready to be delivered from the womb, partially delivered from
the womb and in what is called partial-birth abortion, that child not only
can still be put to death. How can it be that a child partially out of its
mother womb can still be destroyed? Why? Where is the justice here? What
will be next?
I have preached before about the fact that two Nobel Prize winners in
science have both argued that a child should be permitted to live for
several days, then if the parents decide that they do not want the child
to live any longer, the child can be put to death. That is horrifying!
We used to speak of days in which perhaps there was less understanding,
when pagan parents would dare to put their children to death at a
particular time. Now we are talking about one of the most civilized
countries ever to have been developed in this world. How can this be? It
seems to me that it can be, in part, because of our indifference to the
sacred. We do not live merely in the secular. This is not merely a world
of dollars and cents. This is not merely a world of fractured television
where pictures race at us more rapidly than we can begin to absorb them.
But we do know the frequency with which so many of those pictures, so many
of those words, are not only purely secular but they are antithetical to,
contradictory to, everything sacred. This, it sees to me, is of immense
importance. The loss of the sense of the sacred.
I think most of us admit, if we see any television at all now, if we
see any of the commercial advertising, that there is a secularism that has
eaten into our very bones, that has taken over our minds and our hearts.
What has this done to our children?
I wonder how often today we even hear the word purity? When I was a
youngster growing up, and I think the same is true of many of you here,
this was an operative word in homes and in schools. One spoke very
specifically and often very clearly and strongly about purity. So many of
our teachers, religious and lay, were very careful about this. Whereas
this made a significant contribution, we failed simultaneously to do
something else, and that is to integrate this concept into the totality of
life. Maybe as teachers, as priests, as parents we singled out a
particular virtue, an important virtue indeed, but only one virtue of the
totality of living, the totality of living that must be marked with
reverence. Every aspect of life must be marked with an understanding of
the sacredness of human life, of everything that we do, of everything that
we think, of the way in which we treat one another, with graciousness,
with gentleness, with awareness of our sacredness because each one of us
is made in the living image of Almighty God. Is this what young people
must be taught above all else? I do not suggest for a moment, of course,
that we abandon the formal teaching of purity in itself, but that it be
integrated into the totality of living. It is one virtue, the living of
which is made easier if we recognize that it is all part of life, part of
marriage, part of your sensitivity toward each other, your love for each
other, your gentleness for all of life. That, I think, is what can bring
about a new sense, a new emergence of that which will be so meaningful in
spreading the word life, this treasure given to us by Almighty God. Life
is sacred.
We are told in Scripture, "The reign of God is at hand! Reform
your lives and believe in the good news!" That is the beginning of
today's gospel. [Mk. 1:14-20]. This is what our Divine Lord told His new
apostles at the very beginning. Our being is good news. Our bodies are
good news. Our minds, our hearts, our souls, these are good news. We use
the words, "made in the image and likeness of God." That is what
these words mean. Today our Lord put them in this very basic fashion. He
announces to those He is about to select as His apostles, "The reign
of God is at hand! He is here. Reform your lives and believe in the good
news!"
The good news, as you know, is the gospel. Our Lord is saying,
incorporate everything into the gospel, into the good news. If we present
life as good news than at least there is the possibility that it will be
accepted as such, that fewer lives will be lost, that we will make clear
to everyone that we are God's people. We are not people without faith,
without hope, without joy, without love. We are different. We believe in
life, the sacredness of every human life. That is true for any woman, of
any religious persuasion. We can not write any one off. We can not assume
that any one is lost, nor can we assume bad will on the part of those who
may be operating out of ignorance, misunderstanding or desperate need.
Mother Teresa of Calcutta, in a very beautiful, brief passage tells us:
Peace is not a global issue, it is sheer hypocrisy to even hope for
world peace when we, as individuals, wage war upon the most defenseless of
God's creatures, the unborn.
So often Mother Teresa would say these things with such simplicity. The
essence of it is, when we as individuals wage war upon the most
defenseless of God's creatures, the unborn, then we can not expect global
peace. We can have all sorts of treaties. We can have wars and rumors of
wars allegedly trying to achieve peace, but, as Mother Teresa puts it, we
can not even begin to hope for peace under those circumstances.
Finally, Mother Teresa says in a very beautiful quotation:
Jesus is the Unwanted - to be wanted. Jesus is the Leper - to wash his
wounds. Jesus is the Beggar - to give him a smile. Jesus is the Drunkard -
to listen to him. Jesus is the Mental - to protect him. Jesus is the
Little one - to embrace him. Jesus is the Blind - to lead him. Jesus is
the Dumb - to speak for him. Jesus is the Crippled - to walk with him.
Jesus is the Drug Addict - to befriend him. Jesus is the Prostitute - to
remove from and danger and befriend her Jesus is the Prisoner - to be
visited. Jesus is the Old - to be served.
Jesus is my God Jesus is my Spouse Jesus is my Life Jesus is my only
Love Jesus is my All in All Jesus is my Everything
How this can change the world!
