Scandal

Today, after reading a newspaper article, I remembered the first time I was deeply scandalised in a parish I attended in Kelowna. The article summarized a recent study on elderly people in France who never or almost never have contact with the outside world. The title, loosely translated from the French, read: In France, half a million elderly people experience social death. It went on to describe the heartbreaking condition of people who have almost no social network or whose families are scattered across Europe or the world and therefore are no longer part of their lives. I know full well that this reality is the lot of far too many Canadian seniors as well.

I will not identify the parish. It matters little which one it was. The incidence could have happened and most certainly has in any number of them in British Columbia or here in Ottawa. I was eucharistic minister and on duty that Sunday. On leaving the church after mass, a woman approached me to talk to me. I did not know her name but had seen her often with her husband. They were a beautiful elderly couple, always smiling, always visibly very happy to take part in the celebrations. That day, she was alone and the gentle smile that usually graced her face was absent. What I could read instead in her eyes was deep sadness and grief.  

She told me that her husband had been in the hospital for over a month and that no one from the parish had visited him in all that time. I was taken aback by this. How could that be possible in a parish that I always considered beautifully alive and filled with so many faithful people? How could that have happened? My heart went out to her, and I said I would go see him that afternoon. When I got to his room, he was fully dressed, and his things were packed. He had been released and would be heading home soon. He recognized me when I entered and gave me a most radiant smile, one filled with gratitude: the parish he loved had not abandoned him after all and someone from that community was there as a witness to that. As I left the hospital, I knew that he was on a journey of recovery not only from the physical illness he had endured but also from the deep wound that occurred when he felt the community had abandoned him.

The scandal that affected me profoundly that day was that I was oblivious to the fact that people who were ill and cut off from the parish needed support, my support. What scandalised me was that I had been blind to that reality.