Fr. John Harvey, OSFS - Priest and Pioneer — Remembering Father John F. Harvey, OSFS

The following presentation by Fr. Paul Check was given at the 2018 Courage-EnCourage Conference which celebrated the centennial year of Father Harvey’s birth. Watch the video here.

Introduction

One of the first decisions I made when I got to St. John Fisher was to ask Fr. Bochanski to serve as a spiritual director and as our extraordinary confessor for the men, and he comes faithfully, twice a month at least, to serve the men in that capacity and I hesitate to take credit for anything during my time in succeeding Father Harvey, but certainly one of the best things that happened while I was there was that I met Father Bochanski - met him here - we developed a priestly friendship and I saw the quality and the love that he has as a priest, as a spiritual father, and invited him to come to the main office, the central office, and to serve as the Associate Director, which he did and so it was very easy in a sense for me once Bishop Caggiano told me that I was going home to Bridgeport, to recommend Fr. Bochanski. This morning’s annual in-person board meeting was a tour-de-force of all of the work that he and of course the staff that supports him continues to do. I think he said he’d been on 41 airplanes already this year and we’re only in July so an example of the great dedication and devotion that Father exercises on our behalf, so thank you Father Philip.

Fr. Paul Check giving this presentation at
the 2018 Courage-EnCourage Conference

Many of you have been very gracious in asking about my parents. They’re not here this year and they will miss it - they’ll watch this video one day so I’m going to take a moment just to pay tribute to them. My Dad turned 84 in May - I went home for his birthday - my Mom will be 82 in August and they are as lively and cheerful and thoughtful about the apostolate as they’ve ever been, and they’ll be happy to know so many of you have asked about them.

I live at the seminary now and of course it’s another work of spiritual fatherhood, but I also live with my spiritual father - Bishop Caggiano - he lives right across the hall from me - and we went through a major renovation last summer and we have much more work to do, but when it was complete - or when I thought it was complete, he said to me “Something’s missing" and I said, “Well, Your Excellency, what’s that? We have this nice apartment for you now” and I’d taken him around and it looks well and so he said “No, there’s something that’s missing; it should be hanging outside my door” and I thought what is he speaking about and he said “I want to see a complaint box!” And I thought “Well, I don’t know why you would want to see that because you work at a chancery all day and people probably come and complain to you from time to time.” Is that true Bishop Olmsted? Do people come and complain to you? They may. Or Bishop Byrne? But, he said, “No, you have it wrong - the complaint box is for you!” That he who is my tenant, I am his landlord, would occasionally leave little missives for me about things that are not perhaps as they should be. So that’s fine - I still haven’t put it up yet. In the fullness of time…

I do want to really say that in the year, year and a half that I’ve been at Fisher, Courage has never been far from my mind and heart. I treasure the grace that was given to me so generously by our Lord through Father Harvey and through you, so to come back and to see so many friends and so many smiling faces and to watch many of you grow and deepen in your faith - Archbishop Chaput said it right - this is a more important work than the Napa Institute, and I’ve been there and it’s a lively and vital place, but this is something unique, special, a gem, a jewel in the crown of the Church and I do miss the regular contact I had with Courage members although I do hear from some of you from time to time and I’m very, very grateful for that. My time here is short - I have to drive back to Connecticut tonight - I’m overdue on some projects that I owe for the Bishop and he's going on vacation soon, so that’s my impetus to get them done tomorrow and Saturday, but the work goes very well - we have fine men studying for the priesthood and I hope that you will occasionally include us in your prayers.

Reflection on Fr. Harvey

Father Harvey moving through Penn Station

The legacy of Father Harvey, and to reflect for a few minutes with you this evening about this great grace and his influence in my priesthood is itself a blessing because I’m able to cast my mind back to when I first met him and he was very faithful to his mission even in that moment. I went down to New York in, I want to say, the Fall of 2002/2001 with Fr. Scalia and we went to see Father Harvey because we’d heard of him and we knew a little bit about the apostolate and he agreed to meet us I think in Penn Station and we were going to go out to lunch so we encountered Father and we were standing there and we were talking and he said “Now I know a place for lunch and would that be okay we’ll go to lunch and then we’ll back to the office.” So I turned to Fr. Scalia and he turned to me to sort of confer about that plan, was that going to be alright, we’d go to lunch and then we’d go back to the office; meanwhile, Father Harvey was already half-way across Penn Station on his way to the Tick Tock Diner that some of you will probably remember. So right away, he knew where he was going and he got on his way and we looked at each other and said, Well, we better catch up. And he was a sprightly 80-something in those days.

How many of you knew Father Harvey - just to see? Okay, well, that means that there are a lot who did not, and to Father Bochanski’s point, it’s important that we review some things that we owe to him and to preserve that memory. Most of all I think of Father Harvey as an advocate for an often unknown and underserved community in the Church and that’s you, the people in this room and many others and, if he had a sadness and, certainly he would share them from time to time, the sadness was that there were not enough people who knew about Courage, there were not enough Chaplains or priests who were ready to support the apostolate and I commend my brothers who are here and I agree again with Archbishop Chaput that you have taken on a responsibility that others have, for one reason or another, not taken up, and so, that advocacy took the form of his spiritual fatherhood and his great love for you and the people who are here in this room. And even though this is a community often unknown and underserved, it’s no less vital, no less faithful and it was one of course that Father loved and served so generously for a long time.

In the religious life when there is a need to think about renewal or there is indeed a renewal necessary, it always begins with a return to the charism, to go back to the beginning to go back to see where that first grace was given so that that religious community can understand itself and its place in the Church and receive the guidance that it has through the Church to live well, so that’s a little bit of my thought here this evening because what I was able to do if I did anything in those years, what Father continues to do, rests on the foundation that Father Harvey and those seven original members in lower Manhattan in the fall of 1980 established, along of course with Cardinal Cooke and Fr. Groeschel of happy memory. We are building on their legacy in what I hope is an organic way.

So this is a personal reflection that I hope will share some things that will benefit you - it’s not so much a biography; I have some anecdotes for you - but it’s more the legacy that we carry on that’s important to me - the ideas that inform Father’s priestly life and his work at Courage, and then my own.

Some of you might want to know how it is that I came to this, well I’ve told the story before about how I became a Chaplain, but the story of how I became the Director: In 2006 in St. Louis, after one of the plenary sessions, I just happened to be walking by Father Harvey who was sitting down at one of the chairs, one of the benches and he was taking some notes or something and he noticed me walking by and he said, “Oh, oh, Father Check!” “Yes, Father?” “I want you to know that I have asked your Bishop to release you to be my successor.” And then he put his head back down and starting writing again, and went back to his work. Faithful to his mission, whatever it was! And that was the end of the conversation. And I said thank you and I kept walking. A year and a half later, after his persistence, Bishop Lori finally gave in and said yes.

But the self-forgetfulness of Father Harvey - his quick smile, his easy laugh are things that are impressed very deeply in my memory, and he’s one of a series of priests - and you know priests like this who laboured faithfully and quietly in the vineyard for a long time in a period difficult in the Church’s history after the second Vatican Council - men like Father Jim Lloyd for instance who will be joining us I understand this weekend, or Fr. Don TImone - men who didn’t call attention to themselves and avoided a lot of turmoil and controversy simply by being faithful to their work as priests, by being very steady in the work they were doing and trusting in God’s providence and one of the things that I found about Father Harvey, and Father Philip referred to Cardinal Newman who’s someone who’s been important to me in my priesthood, in one of his prayers, the Radiating Christ prayer, that was a prayer for us at one of the conferences here, he says, “the catching force, the sympathetic influence of what we do” - I think of that in Father Harvey - something about him was engaging and catching in the way that he did things and lived and especially in his spiritual fatherhood, maybe that’s why St. John Paul II said to him “Courage is doing the work of God.”

When Alexander Solzhenitsyn spoke at Harvard in 1978, he said that the moral confusion in the United States was due to a loss of faith and a loss of courage and those were problems of course that Father Harvey never had and those problems are not here in this room which is filled with faith and filled with courage. Father Harvey was a great student of St. Augustine. You might know he wrote his doctoral dissertation on Augustine’s confessions. In another work The City of God, Augustine speaks about two things that are essential for Christians to live in a fallen world - one is realism - we have to see the world as it is - and secondly hope, because the way the world is is not the final word. So those were qualities of Father Harvey’s character and I want to just look under three rubrics tonight - three headings which show Father Harvey’s realism and hope and so they are: Fr. Harvey, man of God; Fr. Harvey, man of the Church; and Fr. Harvey, man of charity.

Fr. Harvey: Man of God

*1618 oil painting of St. Francis de Sales*
Artist: Jean Baptiste Costaz

Remember seeing in the Gospel there’s an encounter between Jesus and a Doctor of the law who makes bold to ask the Lord “What’s the greatest commandment?” To love the Lord your God with all your mind, heart, soul, and strength and your neighbour as yourself and for that Jesus is commended. He says “Well said, teacher”, the man says to Him, and Jesus says in reply to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of heaven.” I start this way, friends, because to understand Father John Harvey as a priest, as an Oblate of St. Francis de Sales, to know something about their spirituality, their devotion to the Sacred Heart is to understand the primacy of the love of God for this man. That’s where it begins. It begins with him gratefully and generously receiving the love of God and then responding to it. Now that seems so obvious to say and maybe even too obvious to me to mention, but I’ve been a priest 21 years, I’ve heard a lot of confessions. My opinion is - it’s only my opinion - that the commandment that is most transgressed and least confessed is the first - and I’m not excluding myself from that. So the phrase to “Live Jesus” is something that was enfleshed in this man, an Oblate of St. Francis de Sales, because he received the love of God and rested in the Sacred Heart so that he could live that humility of Christ, that gentleness and that charity. St. Francis who was his father in religion concludes the Treatise on the Love of God this way, he says “but that we may live in your eternal love, O Saviour of our souls, we eternally sing Live Jesus, Jesus I love, live Jesus whom I love, Jesus I love, Jesus who lives and reigns forever and ever, Amen.”

I was so pleased to listen to the Archbishop’s sermon tonight, I have such abundant respect and admiration for him, and the way he spoke about the infatuation or the fascination that God has with each of us as his beloved sons and daughters. This was something very real in the mind and heart of John Harvey; something that we could see on his face. So think about this divine promise that’s in John 14, the farewell discourse: “If a man loves me, he will keep my word and my Father will love him and we will come to him and make our home with him.” John 14:23. That’s something that reminds me of the heart and the character of Father Harvey and why he was able to do so many of the things that he did that were challenging and of course well known to you. If a man loves me - that’s what Jesus says - then he will keep my word and my Father will love him and then we will come and we will be resident in his heart.

So many of you ask me what to do: How can I live? What do I say? What is the devotion? What is the right way to approach this circumstance? - and often I don’t have good counsel or advice for you, except this: This is what made Father Harvey the good and faithful and holy priest that we know him to be - so we face many difficulties and you, much more than I; there’s confusion and pain and there are many things that are beyond our control - but this is always first: the love of God and our response to it. So as a priest, and even given the specific and demanding character of the work that we jointly undertake here, I can not offer you anything more important or anything more than I saw in that great priest. The tree is known by its fruit, isn’t it? So you remember the fruits of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control (or sometimes rendered temperance or chastity). Those are things that I associate with Father Harvey.

I inherited many things from Fr. Harvey when we changed over - I never say that I replaced him; I barely succeeded him, but one thing I inherited was a periodic phone call from a man who was clearly agitated and angry, and the conversation, or at least his part of it, often was laced with profanity and vulgarity and this sort of thing, and this was something that he had been doing to Father Harvey for years, would call him up and berate him over the phone and then, well, that became my duty and responsibility to receive these calls after 2008 and I would say, “Well, why are you doing this?” I mean, I don’t know that he and I had ever met. And he said “Well, I used to do this with Father Harvey because I wanted to test his charity. I wanted to see if he was really the man that people said he was and I thought if I could provoke him, then I would unmask him in a sense.” He never did. I hadn’t heard from that fellow for a while and a few months back I happened to be in the secretary’s office in the seminary. I just happened to pick up the phone, and it was that man, and I said, “You know, I haven’t heard from you in a while… How are you doing?” And he said, “You know, Father, I owe you an apology. You listened to these tirades as Father Harvey listened to these tirades, and they really weren’t the right thing to do.” So I don’t say that because I’m trying to throw any sparkle on myself - that’s not the point - the point is that Father Harvey was what we believed him to be and this is one little anecdote I think that bears it out. There are many others.

*Healing of the Blind Man by Jesus Christ*
Artist: Carl Bloch

I think Father Harvey was given a big and demanding job because he had a big heart that was expansive with the love of God. Think of the story of Bartimaeus the blind man. What does the crowd say to him after Jesus indicates that he wants to speak with him? “Take courage!” He says. “He, Jesus, is asking for you.” And I think that was the Lord’s words, someone’s words to Father Harvey: “Take courage! Take courage on because Jesus is asking for you to do this.” With that simple and secure trust in God that we knew him to have, Father Harvey responded. And so that generous and noble heart became the vessel for the grace and charism that is ours.

Now you and I think of love as benevolence, right? To will the good of the other, and that’s fine, and we think of love as sacrifice, and certainly that’s fine and has its place, but the core of charity is this: it’s the love of God and friendship with Christ and the Holy Spirit. More than anything else, this is what distinguishes the Saint or the person striving to be celibate and that is why I offer you this point. Many of you are parents here, EnCourage parents. What is it you want most from your children? You want them to love you as you love them. Where did that impulse in your heart come from? Well, God the Father put it there because He wants us to love Him - to love Him for who He is, not just what He does for us - and that’s one of the reasons why chastity is such an important virtue, because it prevents us from making another person a means to an end and loving them or at least being attracted to them or desiring them, not for who they are but for what they can do. That’s why chastity is an important virtue so that we can love rightly and generously because a person is not a means to an end. But God doesn’t want us just to love Him for His gifts. He wants us to love Him for who He is and to appreciate Him for bestowing those generous gifts on us. He wants to be loved for who He is - our loving and merciful Father. For St. Paul what mattered most was that he was loved by Christ. St. John called himself the beloved apostle, not because he meant that in an exclusive or presumptuous way, but that’s how he thought of himself: “I am the one that the Lord loves.”

And that’s such a key part of our ministry, isn’t it? The question of our identity. This is the challenge of the day, because people do not know who they are and they get confused in a number of ways. What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman? What does it mean to be a Christian? The question of identity is central to the Courage apostolate and the most important thing is that we are God’s beloved children - that’s first. And we’re redeemed by the precious blood of the Father’s Son Jesus Christ and, in a state of grace, we’re the temples of the Holy Spirit. Those answer the questions: Who am I? What am I? and Why am I? The Second Vatican Council said it like this: Christ the new Adam fully reveals man to himself and his most high calling. So it’s Jesus who teaches us who we are and that begins with Him loving us, us recognizing that and receiving that love. We have to be aware of and reject false identities, false narratives or stories about ourselves. That’s why Father Harvey was very careful about vocabulary. And I know there was a time when we did use the word homosexual as a noun or we even used it as an adjective to modify person - “homosexual person” - but that changed. That changed upon reflection - why? Because someone’s dignity cannot be reduced to or explained by their sexual attractions. So we don’t use gay and lesbian or homosexual as nouns or homosexual to modify a person. The phrase same-sex attraction takes a little more effort to get off the lips, but it’s more precise, it’s more careful, it’s more thoughtful, it’s more respectful. And that’s one of the great gifts of the Courage apostolate is to be precise in this way, and to think carefully about dignity.

*Saint Paul*
Artist: Giovanni Francesco Barbieri

How do we love people and how do we affirm them? Well, we can affirm them intellectually, if you like, for their convictions because what they believe is true. So we can affirm that about them - the ideas that they have are right. Or we can affirm them in their behaviour, in their choices. So we can affirm them in their will. But if they’re believing wrong things, we can’t affirm that. And if they’re living in a wrong way, we cannot affirm that. But we can always affirm someone in their dignity, in their emotions if you like, not in the superficial sense, but in the sense that I take delight in you because you exist and because you’re unique. We can affirm and love people in that way, and that is one of the hallmarks I think of the way Father Harvey instructed us to understand the question of homosexuality. To put on the mind of Christ is an exhortation from my patron saint, St. Paul, and I’ve said to some of you and others in different settings that part of the goal of the Christian life is to be able to see ourselves and to see others as Jesus sees us, and as Jesus sees them, because Jesus does not see us first through the prism of sexual attraction. He looks deeply into the soul to see that image and likeness in which we’ve been created.

Descartes made many mistakes - I think one of them was “I think, therefore I am” - but today we don’t even say that, today we say “I feel, therefore I am.” And so this is a big confusion. Our feelings while important - emotions are certainly important, they’re a constituent of our humanity, we can’t be human without them - they need to be guided and purified, of course. I think the most important words in the five goals of Courage which we just recited are these “to dedicate our entire lives to Christ.” Those are the most important words, from my point of view - because that’s it. Having received the love of God, we are now to return it to the source - God - and to that image that is in us, and that for me describes Father Harvey’s priestly life and it helps explain why he served as the founding director of so challenging an apostolate, because he had these goods in the right order: love of God and love of God’s image in us, in you. We pray the creed on Sundays and on solemnities we say that we believe in an apostolic Church and when we hear “apostolic”, we tend to think of the apostolate - ok, this is an apostolate - but the first meaning of the word “apostolic” is to live like the apostles lived, and before they went out and preached, how did they live? They lived close to the Master, receiving what He was giving to them: His love, His mercy, His care, His concern, His teaching, and of course, occasionally His correction - and that’s how we want to live, and that’s how Fr. Harvey lived, by receiving the love of God.

And so this means that Courage & EnCourage, while addressing the particular question of homosexuality, go far beyond it. For us, this is not just about a moral question, to abstain from a particular sin. It’s necessary of course to foster chastity because lust and unchaste behaviour impede a relationship with God and a relationship with one another. They’re real dangers - so we want to think in terms of removing obstacles in God’s love - and if Courage were principally about just the moral question and only about chastity, then we would inadvertently support the idea that same-sex attraction lies at the heart of a person’s identity and that’s of course not true. In Matthew 19 we find the phrase “chastity for the sake of the Kingdom” and we often associate that with priests and religious; however, I would like to suggest to you that “chastity for the sake of the Kingdom” is why you’re here, so I want to connect the first commandment: “To love the Lord our God with all our mind, heart, soul, and strength, and love our neighbour as ourself,” or as Jesus recast it, “Love one another as I have loved you.” I want to connect that to the sixth commandment: chastity for the sake of the Kingdom. If you look at Romans 1 in that difficult section where Paul writes about homosexuality, he’s connecting the first commandment and the sixth commandment also, indicating that if the sixth commandment isn’t lived well, we will lose our path to God. So that’s it in the negative sense - chastity is necessary so that we don’t obscure our vision of God - unchaste behaviour, lustful behaviour can move us away.

But it’s the Catholic faith in its fulness that is of interest to us here, and it’s reflected in the conference talks and speakers that we try to have over the years, because the Gospel, Christianity, Catholicism, is much more than a code of ethics. I’m a moral theology teacher and I’m very proud of the fact that I’m chapter three in the Catechism - not chapter one, not chapter, two, but chapter three. First is the creed, first is our doctrinal understanding of who God is and who we are in relationship to Him, and then there’s the sharing of the life of God through the sacraments, the liturgy, so think about John chapter 4, how our Lord encounters the woman at the well. He knows there’s a moral problem, right? How many husbands? But He doesn’t start with that. He starts with the mutual interest in God. She’s interested in God. Then He says, “The life of God can be shared with you through the living water.” That’s the metaphor for the sacraments. So creed, sacraments, and then he gets to the moral question. We know how successful He was because on the other side of that conversation, she goes out and says to people, “Here’s a man who took time to get to know me, was interested in me as a person, knew something of my heart” and she becomes a disciple, doesn’t she? That’s Father Harvey: someone who taught us about God, sharing the life of God through the sacraments, not forgetting the moral question, but not leading with the moral question, and that personal encounter, taking the time and care to get to know someone and befriending them in the Lord. That’s how I think about him.

And it was part of the wisdom of Father Harvey to keep Courage out of the so-called “culture war” - a phrase I don’t really care for, but you know what I mean by it - and even battles within the Church, Father Harvey kept us out of those things - and wisely so, because that is not our mission. Our mission is to receive the love of God and to respond to it within a particular setting with a particular group of people. If we understand that, we can move away also from what Father Harvey called white-knuckled chastity, right? You know what I’m talking about. And that chastity of the heart which was so important to him to teach us because it’s the chastity that’s informed by the love of God, by receiving it and by responding to it. In the Catechism it says either man governs his passion and finds peace or he lets himself become dominated by them - his passions - and becomes unhappy. The love of God is going to show us the way forward. I’m thinking of a very fine pamphlet that Fr. Bochanski did to help people break away from the scourge of pornography. And what’s the title of it? Some of you have it, right? “You are Loved!” Yes, that’s where it begins.

So not just the moral question, in Father Harvey’s way of thinking - it’s the primacy of God’s love and another way that we see this is that though he was the vessel, he never considered the apostolate “his”. I never had any sense of that. There was no proprietary interest in him. The two years that we had to transition and work together, there was never any sense that I received - because it was absent I’m sure - that this was sort of “his” work - no, it was the Lord’s work and that was something clear. Probably my favourite phrase from Fr. Harvey? “Our best ambassadors are our members!” There you are - our best ambassadors are our members. So let me embarrass a few of you now who have done such great work over the years in different settings. I’ll start with Tina and Angelo - they better be here, right? Are they here? No, they’re probably checking people in! Alright, well they’ll see it, they’ll see it - they’ll watch it one day. Aww, there’s Tina - come on. And of course, I have a special place for Paul, Dan, and Rilene - Desire of the Everlasting Hills - are they in the room? There’s Paul - Dan isn’t here yet - oh, Dan is there! Dan is there, and Rilene is probably checking people in somewhere, huh? And we’ve got some very fine men here in Philadelphia. I’m especially going to call out Karl for the fine article he wrote in America magazine. Next time somebody says to me, “Uh Father, what do we do about Father Martin?”, I’m going to say “Go see Karl M. He’s got the answer - he wrote the article.” Our best ambassadors are our members and there are a lot of you here who have given witness talks in different places and who carry the message into chanceries and into parishes and into special ministries, and thank you for that. That is the love of God at work. (I’m wearing out our poor translators here.)

So just to finish up this first section, Father Harvey, man of God, he might not have always felt strong institutional support, and we’ve all sensed that; although I’m very glad Bishop Byrne is here, Bishop Olmsted is on our Episcopal Board, and Bishop Konderla are you in the room? Yes, former and still kind of quasi-current Courage Chaplain? Yes, there you are! See? So we’ve got some good institutional support here - but we know that we’d like it to be more, but Father Harvey always knew we had strong divine support and that’s more important - strong divine support, why he’s a man of God. Remember what St. Paul says: “Where sin abounds grace abounds all the more.” Yes.

Fr. Harvey: Man of the Church

Alright, Father Harvey, man of the Church:

In the chapel where I went to Mass for five years, four as a seminarian and one as a priest, there’s a depiction of the vine and the branches. Coming up underneath the tabernacle is the vine, underneath the altar, down into the nave, and the branches are underneath the benches that the seminarians sit in. That’s a great image for the priesthood - very good image for men studying for the priesthood to see everyday, to remind them that without Jesus we can do nothing. So, being bound to the Church - and we’re bound to the Church of course, in grace, by baptism. We’re also bound to the Church by promises, in the case of those of us who’ve made those promises or vows. We’re bound to the Church by what we think, in the way that we act. We have a couple of beloved Jesuits - we can say that - beloved Jesuits. There’s my friend Fr. Ryan over there, S.J., and we think of Fr. Knapp - remember Fr. Knapp? So St. Ignatius gave us, their father in religion gave us that great line “centari cum ecclesia” which is hard to translate into English because it’s not just to think with the Church or feel with the Church, it’s like to resonate - your whole being is vibrating with the Church. The whole person is harmonious with the Church. We saw that in Father Harvey - obviously we know his doctrinal clarity and his moral soundness and his determination to teach the full tapestry of the sixth commandment.

One of the dangers for us is isolating one part - homosexuality. Father Harvey didn’t do that because chastity is a virtue for all Christians. Father Harvey lived his spiritual fatherhood to bring people into closer union with Christ and the Church. That’s in our second goal. Through the mysteries of the sacraments and in prayer and so form closer bonds of truth and charity in the mystical body. The story I heard about how Father Harvey began an interest in this work - this is long before Courage actually started - was in response to a request or, if you like, a command from his superior: “John, we need someone to know a little bit more about this topic of homosexuality - you teach moral theology, I want you to study it. I want you to learn about it so that you can teach our seminarians, our novices about the question.” And so obediently, Father Harvey took up that study and from that of course, from that simple obedience. Cardinal Cooke - Cardinal Cooke had the idea of starting something - called Fr. Groeschel, said what can we do, how can we do this? And Fr. Groeschel said I know a man who’s been working in the field, he’s been labouring in this part of the vineyard for the Church, and he introduced Father Harvey to Cardinal Cooke, Cardinal Cooke asked Fr. Harvey, will you do this? And I’m sure that there was a proper connection to Father’s superiors in the Oblates, and Father said Yes, I will. The Church was asking him to do something, and he did it.

And that’s how we know how important it is for us in Courage to have the presence of the successors of the apostles here with us because they represent the Church to us so we’re grateful to the Bishops who are in the room, to the Archbishop who offered Mass, the others who will participate, those who are on our Episcopal Board, to the other Bishops who support us so generously. For us, they represent the Church - they are our Fathers in the Church and Father Harvey instilled that deeply in us. And he instilled deeply in us too a care for Church documents and precision in care with which we speak about these things - a refinement of language I’ve mentioned to you before, and even when things were difficult - and there were times in our transition when things were hard - not because there was any difficulty between Father and me, no, there never was - but there were forces that were at work in different ways that made the transition difficult and I remember walking back with Fr. Harvey to the Courage office - we had lunch periodically with Fr. Gerry Murray at his rectory - you’ll hear from Father tomorrow I think - and I remember saying, because this was a particularly trying moment, I said Father, this is like your passion, isn’t it? And he kind of stopped and reflected on it and said, Yes, this is very difficult. But even with that, there was no bitterness, there was no discouragement, there was no resentment, there was no self-pity. I never saw those things in him. He was an obedient son. He would listen to what the Church asked him to do, even when it was difficult, even when it could be a little bit humiliating.

But the Church did give him accommodation I think, it doesn’t mention him by name - well it mentions Courage in a footnote - we know how important footnotes are today in ecclesiastical documents - can I say that? With a smile. In footnote 44 in the 2006 document from the USCCB, it mentions Courage! And that was a tribute to Fr. Harvey - footnote 44 - so go and look at that in the 2006 document. And at the end of that document - he’s not mentioned by name, but I think the man who wrote this knew Father Harvey well and had him in mind. This is the tribute: “We extend a word of thanks to our brothers and sisters who have labored so patiently and faithfully in pastoral ministry and outreach to persons with a homosexual inclination. They have done so at times under adverse and difficult conditions. They have set an example for this important service to the Church.” I think that was about Fr. Harvey, yes. So the Church did commend him in that way.

Why is there such a market for self-help books, do you think? Do you ever reflect on that? I don’t a lot, but somebody posed the question to me the other day, cause I never really thought about it too much. Why is there such a market for these kinds of books, and videos and talks and motivational speakers and all this kind of thing? Because people want to realize their potential. They want to realize their potential - they want to live good and not just successful lives, and so there is a cottage industry and more than that, that has grown up around this. But the fulfillment of the human heart doesn’t come in that way - it can only come in a limited way - that human flourishing is found in Christ and His Church. That’s where the fulfillment of the heart is, that’s where we thrive and that’s why what is pastoral is what is true - or if you like, what is doctrinal. What the Church teaches us about ourselves, what the Church teaches us about Jesus Christ - these truths are the things upon which our pastoral charity rests. Pope Benedict said it this way, he said: Jesus is logos - which means of the Word, the truth of the Word, and He’s agape - He is that self-giving charity or love. These things are of course shared with His Church. Fr. Harvey taught us that we can’t be more merciful than Jesus, and we shouldn’t try. Remember John 8? The woman caught in unchastity? Neither do I condemn you. Now go and do not commit this sin again. My grace will help you. I will help you lift yourself out of this circumstance - and so there we find the goodness of the Church to those - and it’s all of course in one measure or another that have stepped over the line in our need of the mercy that Christ has given to His Church to share with us.

The growth of the Courage & EnCourage communities are an expression of our need for friendship, for the love of friends, and that idea I think matured and deepened in Father because of his religious life and his community, and perhaps that will be a theme later on here during the course of the conference. But Father had a great value - valued greatly the blessing of community life. The importance of friendship is mentioned in the Catechism in the section on homosexuality and on chastity. Chastity blossoms in friendship, friendship in the Lord. That chastity makes possible spiritual communion and wards away the plague of loneliness, much of which I think is attributable to promiscuous behaviour. Today we have disposable encounters, disposable relationships, disposable people. All of this is terrible. We need chastity of course, otherwise sex cannot bear the weight of expectation that we place upon it. So friendship - to draw people away from loneliness and isolation and to overcome shame - that was a big part of Father’s message, wasn’t it? That isolated and alone, you’re more subject and vulnerable to shame. Father gave us many things that you know well about in terms of how we talk about this topic, the careful distinctions that we make, the words that we use, the trust that we place in Church documents. All of these things are part of his legacy and they are in the fabric of the apostolate.

St. Paul said to Timothy, “Indeed all who desire to live a Godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” and so we know that Father faced persecution , resistance, and even hostility, but to go back to St. Paul, he was also willing to be a fool for Christ’s sake. Remember the Acts of the Apostles? The apostles left the Sanhedrin full of joy that they had been judged worthy of ill-treatment for the sake of the Name? That was enfleshed in our beloved Fr. Harvey.

So Fr. Harvey, Man of the Church, and finally, Fr. Harvey, Man of Charity:

Fr. Harvey: Man of Charity

Portrait of Father John Harvey
Artist: Gary Hoff

I have a priest friend who says if you’re happy, please notify your face. He never would have had to say that to Fr. Harvey. Fr. Harvey was a cheerful man and that’s all the more remarkable of course because of the challenges of his work. I commend Gary for this magnificent painting - see the peacefulness there. Gary, where are you? Is Gary checking in people too? There are a lot of people on the check-in list. There he is - magnificent! I wear at the seminary the ‘Our Lady of Courage’ vestment that you very graciously gave to me last year, that has the image that Gary painted. But you see in that face a serenity and a peace. Augustine defined peace as the tranquility of order; the ordering of affections, the ordering of our time, the ordering of our interest, the ordering of our energy, most especially love of God and love of neighbour. The tree is known by its fruit. This grace that we see on his face is not simply a temperament, I don’t think, but it’s the fruit of grace at work in his soul. We didn’t use the Roman canon at Mass today, but listen for it next time: the serene and kindly countenance of God’s face; the serene and kindly countenance that is reflected in the face of a faithful servant and holy priest.

Jesus Christ lived a poor, chaste, and obedient life. Those are called the evangelical counsels as we recognize, but He also lived an intensely happy and fulfilled human life - how do we know that? Because He told us. He said I have told you these things that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete. Jesus couldn’t give what He didn’t have. And I would suggest to you that His life was one of joy and fulfillment not in spite of His poverty, chastity, and obedience, but because of them. Our Lord’s heart of course was always filled with the love of the Father and the love of the Father’s image in us. Poverty, chastity, and obedience are renunciations but they are also the means by which the heart is free to love God and neighbour fully. So I think Fr. Harvey’s commitment to poverty, chastity, and obedience has everything to do with the light that we saw shining through his face, and that light it contains a message to the world which says there’s something greater than pleasure or contentment or satisfaction - and that something greater is striving for a holy life through the love of God and the love of neighbour. Remember St. Francis de Sales again: to Live Jesus. Happiness is not what I have or what I do. Happiness is who I am. Happiness is not what we possess, it’s not what we’ve achieved, it’s not what we’re accomplishing, it’s who we are. Happy people are humble, grateful, generous-hearted, who delight in the mercy of God, both receiving it and extending it, they’re compassionate, they understand human weakness and are not scandalized by it. They trust in the goodness of God and they have surrendered their hearts to him. Father Harvey could speak authentically about the blessing of being a child of God and the dignity that being a child of God brings to us because that’s what he prized for himself and then in turn he could extend that charity that he received with us, the gift you have received is the gift you give as a gift.

And those of you who sat with Fr. Harvey, or went to confession to him, or even called him on the phone, you remember his attention on you, the person before him in need of priestly charity. That’s one of the great strengths of Courage and EnCourage - they’re person-centered ministries. And that begins with the example of Father Harvey’s own spiritual childhood, that he received this love from the Father with such joy and delight that he wanted to share it. St. Thomas Aquinas says no man can live without joy, that is why one deprived of spiritual joy goes over to carnal pleasures, Thomas says. So our Lord speaks of spiritual joy, first His own and then how he invites us to share it - and how is that? Well we go back to the section I was quoting before from John 15: He says, I’ve kept the Father’s commandments - think in terms of the virtues the commandments represent - and I abide in His love, now you live those virtues and you will abide in His love. I have told you these things that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete. So there that is - love and joy and virtuous living all go together in the mind of the God-man, and they all went together in the mind of Father John Harvey.

*The Crucifixion with the Two Thieves*
Artist: Alejo Fernández

We’re made for happiness, but we suffer - sometimes intensely, I know from the stories that many of you have shared with me you suffer intensely and even are to this day, and sometimes that suffering goes on for a prolonged period. As a priest I am more than edified by this, I am humbled by it and I see the gift that God is giving me when someone who is suffering is striving to cooperate with the grace that God is giving them when it is difficult, when it’s painful. Father Harvey’s compassion and patience was borne out of his trust in the power of the cross and the wisdom of the cross. Surely our Lord alleviated suffering, yes, but He did not remove it from the world entirely - we know that. What He did, what Jesus did, was He gave suffering the potential to have meaning, to have purpose, to be redemptive. We never hear on the lips of Jesus, “This should not be happening to me” and I never heard Father Harvey say that, and that is an expression of Jesus‘s humility and it’s an expression of Father Harvey’s humility - the willingness to bear the burden whatever it was. Why? Because of the promise: “Take my yolk upon you and learn from me for I am meek and humble of heart and you will find rest.” Do you see, that’s another divine promise. Our Lord made so many of them, didn’t He? He would rise from the dead, he’d give us the bread of life, and here’s another one: We’ll find rest in the power and the wisdom of the cross, because it is there that we encounter the living God. Oscar Wilde who is no stranger to one of our particular topics here said “Through a broken heart may Jesus Christ enter in.” Through a broken heart, a heart that has been opened by some wound or pain, Christ can find His way there.

Now let’s make an important distinction if we’re going to follow Father Harvey, the man of charity: the cross is the central symbol of our faith but ours is not a religion of sorrow. The greatness or nobility of the soul is found in the patient response to suffering, to trial, because suffering can prove to be a blessing or it can be a curse. Think of the two thieves, crucified on either side. And occasionally, I know, I’ll admit it, I’m not proud of this - I would prefer a Saviour who wasn’t crucified. It would be easier to follow such a man. But that would be a betrayal. That would not be Christianity, that would not be redemptive. Jesus without the cross is a counterfeit. Not everyone who says “Lord, Lord” will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, Jesus said, and we will recall that St. Peter confessed Jesus as Lord and then he earned a strong and even stinging rebuke when he tried to warn Jesus away from the cross. But our Lord accepted what came His way; He bore it willingly and we must say courageously, moved by the love of His Father and the love of the Father’s children. And that’s why we can say the beatitudes are the portrait of Christ - that’s St. John Paul II. Christianity, so contrary to what the world presents in terms of what’s human, shows the human spirit at its best: poor in spirit, mourning for sin, in meekness in persecution - those can be real moments of suffering and of pain. But Christianity is not something that’s sterile or severe, or hard. No, we believe in a good God who no longer calls us servants or slaves, but calls us friends.

So part of Fr. Harvey’s spirituality as a son of St. Francis de Sales is embraced in a phrase from Colossians that some of you are going to recognize: Colossians 1:24 - “I make up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ, for the sake of His body the Church.” First time I heard that line, I thought, “What is St. Paul talking about? What’s missing from the sufferings of Christ? Nothing!” But that’s not what Paul means, of course. It’s an invitation to participate in the redemptive suffering of the world by uniting ours to Him. What our Mothers taught us growing up, right? Offering it up, yes, but with a real Christian mature, adult heart. And that’s what Father Harvey did with a priestly heart. So to suffer for and with Christ is first a purification. Jesus didn’t need any purification, but - well, I won’t talk about you - but I do. So first is purification, and then to suffer for and with Christ brings the divinization of the soul. In the East they talk about divinization, here, in the West we talk about sanctification, but the same idea - God became man so that man could become God, and this is how it’s done. It’s that path: holiness of life through the mystery of the Passion. It’s no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me, St. Paul says in Galatians. That’s the crucified and risen Saviour. If we are suffering for and with the Lord, that will purify the soul and open it to grace and will strengthen and build up the mystical body. Go back to Paul’s words: “I make up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ for the sake of His body, the Church.” Our charity, if you like, to the Church. It’s another divine promise.

So some of you - and I feel this way too - we say ,”Y’know, we need to talk to the Pope” or “We have to talk to the Bishops. Father, what are we going to do?” I understand that kind of response. And there are times maybe where properly we bring something forward. We don’t exalt in the sorrow, we do exalt the cross because the cross is the way to union with Christ and to a mission with Him to build up the mystical body. So your sufferings are not wasted. The real pain that is part of your life, things that you didn’t ask for, things for which you’re not responsible, things that you can’t entirely understand and that you can’t vanquish, that you can’t change. Christ didn’t alleviate all, or relieve the world of suffering, but what He did was He gave it the possibility of having meaning - this is the divine charity for us here, so that our hearts can be purified, we can grow in holiness and we can help build up the mystical body. Only when what is hidden is revealed will we be able to see what your silent, hidden fidelity has brought about in the Church. We can’t see it right now. There are things that trouble us, we look around, whether it’s culturally or sometimes even ecclesiastically, things trouble us, and they should - that’s fine, but our response is what matters. We take these things to the cross because of the promise that our Lord made: “I will give you rest” and then according to His providence, He will make that fruitful in charity for the mystical body.

So these are my final points, my friends. The tree is known by its fruit. And this great man helped us to understand the relationship between joy and sorrow: how we can understand it in charity. He used to say the hardest thing for us to accept is the permissive will of God. Why does God allow certain things to happen? If we didn’t have the cross [looks for crucifix in room] - ah it’s over there, we do have it - I’m glad somebody made up what was lacking. If we didn’t have the cross, we would not be able to answer that question of innocent suffering and why things happen to good people and all the rest. We have an answer - we may not be able to work it out intellectually, but there is an answer because it’s there in the offering of the Son to the Father. Did some of you do the office of readings for today? I know my brother priests did and some of you lay faithful also read - so the first reading today is where David has a great ambition, a noble ambition. He’s gonna build the temple and that was a good and holy thing he wanted to do, right? And God said through the prophet Nathan, “No, not for you to do, it’s for your son.” And so David was not upset about this, not angry, resentful. He said “Okay, I know my part. I’ll build up the gold and the silver and the bronze, and the craftsmen and the wood and everything that’s necessary, and I will pile these up in great quantities and I will give them to my son and he will build the temple.” What generosity of heart there. You and I may not be able to solve problems immediately, we may be in what I like to call the Davidic period - it’s an adjective I just made up - it’s a new era in salvation history. Through prayer, especially the prayer of the wounded heart, of the pierced heart, of the pierced and broken Sacred Heart; united to the pierced and broken Sacred Heart, through those prayers, gold and silver, spiritually speaking, can be stored up for the Kingdom, to be used as God would have them be used according to His gracious favour and providence.

The Catechism says the way of perfection passed by the way of the Cross. There’s no holiness without renunciation and spiritual battle, gradually leading to a life of peace and joy. The tree is known by its fruit. Our beloved Father Harvey showed us this and he left us a great communion of charity here: the family of Courage and EnCourage. You had that sense at Mass. One of you was speaking with me before - I won’t embarrass this person but, was saying to me during the Mass, the tears were coming because the praying community together, here. This person’s suffering because of something going on in the family, but here, in this communion of charity, praying together, worshipping, loving God, in the Chapel, conversation at table, conversation privately, conversation in the groups, here in this room, this is where these bonds of charity are being formed and deepened.

Father Harvey embodied charity and courage. He resisted false ideas of freedom, not the freedom from constraint, but a freedom for virtue, for charity, for goodness, for holiness, for self-giving, for God and His people. St. Paul said to the Corinthians “Enlarge your hearts.” We have an example of a man who enlarged his heart, whose heart was stretched and fired by the burning Sacred Heart of Jesus and we shelter in that great heart tonight, grateful for what he gave to us. So I’ll end my exhortation there, friends, my reflection on this wonderful man who left such a deep impression on all of us and in my priesthood. I don’t think I’ve told you anything you don’t know.

At this point in our lives, most of us know what is right; we just need the grace and the courage to do it.

God bless you.

Fr. John Harvey, OSFS: Priest & Pioneer

In Memory of Father John F. Harvey, O.S.F.S.

The Making of a Moral Theologian