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Painting by Paolo Veronese showing Jesus eating next to the tax collector, Levi, in Levi’s house along with assorted sinners.

Mark 2:13-17

Jesus Calls Levi and Eats With Sinners

¹³ Once again Jesus went out beside the lake. A large crowd came to him, and he began to teach them. ¹⁴ As he walked along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” Jesus told him, and Levi got up and followed him.

¹⁵ While Jesus was having dinner at Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were eating with him and his disciples, for there were many who followed him. ¹⁶ When the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw him eating with the sinners and tax collectors, they asked his disciples: “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?”

¹⁷ On hearing this, Jesus said to them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

I have always had a special place in my heart for the Legion of Mary.  The men and women who were members of the Legion were exemplars faith, hope and charity.  They not only participated in the highly organized devotions and prayer-life of the Legion but they were also very generous and dedicated in their evangelization activities.  When I became the first and founding Bishop of the new Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee in 1975 I chose as my secretary a woman, a native of Argentina, named Mary Mooney.  I soon learned that she was very active in the Legion and was actually a member of the Southeast Region Curia of the Legion.  

Through Mary Mooney’s efforts we soon had groups of young people, members of the Legion in northern states, coming to Pensacola-Tallahassee every summer to participate in a Peregrination Pro-Christo, which was a two week period of intensive door to door evangelization at EVERY HOME  in the Diocese.  That was hard work and required real dedication.  Since the Diocese had only 25,000 Catholics in it and was part of the ‘Bible Belt’ of the South, it was especially hard work and very valuable work for the young Diocese.

In 1978 the Legion in the Southeastern United States planned a pilgrimage to Dublin, Ireland to attend the General Concilium of the Legion and they had difficulty finding a priest to accompany them as Chaplain.  I was asked, but I begged off as I had so much to do in the young Diocese.  Then, on August 6, 1978 Pope Paul VI died.

I had a special relationship with Pope Paul VI.  When he was elected Pope and his coronation was scheduled to occur on 21 June 1963 Archbishop Coleman Francis Carroll decided he had to go to the coronation since the Carroll family had been close to Pope Paul VI when he was Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, in the Secretariate of State.  I was shocked when the Archbishop asked me accompany him to the coronation since I had only become a priest of the Archdiocese 23 months earlier on 15 August 1961.  I went to the coronation and have always cherished my memory of meeting Pope Paul VI on that occasion.

When Pope Paul VI died in August of 1978 and Mary Mooney heard that I was planning on flying to Rome for the funeral of Pope Paul VI she pointed out to me that the Legion Pilgrimage still did not have a chaplain and would I please, please join the Pilgrimage in Dublin after the funeral in Rome.  I checked the airline schedule and found that I could take an Air Lingus flight to Dublin from Rome so I agreed to be the Chaplain for the pilgrimage in Dublin.

When my flight made an intermediate stop in Lourdes on the way to Dublin I was dumbfounded to see the Southeast Region Pilgrimage people boarding the flight to Dublin; they had included a visit to Lourdes as part of their itinerary.  They were overjoyed to find me on the airplane, and any doubts that I had had about agreeing to be the Chaplain for the Pilgrimage vanished; God works in strange ways.

In Dublin we attended the General Concilium where it was my special privilege to meet and have extended conversations with Frank Duff, the founder of the Legion of Mary.  From him I learned of his remarkable success in his annual bicycle tour through Europe during with he would ask every stranger he met, “Sure, and have you ever thought about becoming a Catholic?”  Countless people owed their conversion to the faith by being asked that simple, non-threatening question by Frank Duff; I hope and pray that the Cause for his canonization is successful.

Another wonderful part of the Concilium was the report given by a Father Bradshaw who had just returned from Moscow where they had conducted a Perigrination Pro Christo on the streets of Moscow.  I was amazed to hear this and I asked how such a thing could have been allowed by the Soviet authorities.  Father Bradshaw explained that several years before after Frank Duff had published his book, True Devotion to the Nation, the Soviet Ambassador to Ireland informed Frank Duff that he had sent a copy of the book to Moscow and had received instructions to ask Frank Duff to send a Peregrinatio Pro Christo to Moscow every year to talk to people about the book.

But, the biggest surprise was yet to come.  The leadership of the Concilium told me that it was customary for the chaplains accompanying pilgrims to the Concilium to participate in the one-on-0ne evangelization of the Dublin Legion while they were in Dublin.   I asked what I would be doing.  They explained that I would be going every night into the red-light district of Dublin with a lay member of the Legion and we would be confronting the ‘Johns’ who were coming to the district looking for a prostitute and that our work was to talk the ‘John’ out of hooking up with a prostitute and instead to accompany me and the layman to a Legion house in the district where the Legion had a chapel with the Blessed Sacrament reserved and there to counsel the ‘John’, hear his confession, and hopefully persuade him never to return to the district again.  To say that I was alarmed by the prospect of doing this is putting it mildly.  But then, I remembered that Jesus associated with sinners, even prostitutes, and was condemned for such association by the pharisees and I decided that as a successor of the apostles I could not refuse to seek out the lost sheep and try to bring him back to the fold.  Those nights in the red-light district in Dublin saving ‘Johns’ will remain one of the most cherished memories I have of my priestly/episcopal ministry.

Throughout my episcopacy I have had to risk censure from good, well-meaning Catholics who frown on my associating with persons they do not approve of.  There is no doubt that there is always the possibility of “scandal of the weak” who would hold priests and bishops to what they consider to be a higher standard that good society would approve of.  But, for the priest and a bishop the response must always be the same as the Lord’s:  And Levi made himself a great feast in his own house: and there was a great company of tax collectors and of others that sat down with them. But their scribes and Pharisees murmured against his disciples, saying, Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners? And Jesus answering said unto them, “They that are whole need not a physician; but they that are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”