If there were many persons who didn’t watch on October 13 the television coverage from Chile of the rescue of the 33 miners who had been trapped below ground for more than two months, they missed some of the most soul-stirring moments anyone is ever likely to experience. It was also an opportunity to see what it’s like when the Faith is still a force strongly-enough felt in the culture of a people for it to be lived, and not simply occasionally referenced.
Signs of the power of the Faith in the lives of Chileans were too numerous to catalog. Some of them: the makeshift chapels set up all over Camp Hope where the miners’ families had been living; the rosaries that could be glimpsed around the necks of some of the men as they climbed out of the rescue capsule; the way 63-year-old Mario Gomez and others fell to their knees to thank the Blessed Virgin Mary for their safe return; the written message sent from below that there were really 34 down there because God was also present.
Sure, maybe some of these guys were not exactly moral paragons, like the one who had both a wife and mistress waiting for him. Maybe few, or none, was ever thought by others to be particularly “religious” and didn’t think of themselves in such terms. You could still tell they were Catholic through-and-through.
There was also something reassuring in the display of manhood they showed, not simply by surviving their ordeal but in the way they carried themselves and embraced their wives and kissed their children. Reassuring, I say, because the whole group showed it, as did all the other men within range of the cameras from the rescuers going down the shaft to those handling the equipment to the President of the Republic, Sebastian Pinera, in his words and comportment (and how many other heads of government of a Catholic country would allow themselves these days to be caught on camera making the sign of the cross? The Socialist prime minister of Spain? Berlusconi of Italy? Sarkozy of France? It’s inconceivable.) This manhood wasn’t something to be observed merely among isolated individuals as more-and-more seems to be the case in, well, we won’t say where. It was good to know it still exists in abundance someplace.
The women also — the wives, grown daughters and mothers — were wonderful to behold. They even helped explain the behavior of the men, like the mother who related that when her son had written that he didn’t expect to see her again, she wrote back: “Be a man.”
Imagine what it was like for these women during the weeks it was believed their loved ones had to be dead and then ever since when anything could go wrong. Yet, there they stood, every one of them positively radiant as tears of joy and relief poured down their cheeks.
Joy! We mustn’t forget the partying. That, too, was wonderful as the pictures came in of crowds crying and celebrating in front of television screens in San Francisco, Rio, London, Tokyo. This wasn’t some atrocity like 9/11 uniting everybody. For once the entire world had something to be ecstatically happy about. It was very good.
It also left the thought, to get back to the religious note, that at a time when Church officials, for good reason, never stop talking about the need for evangelization, the images out of Copiapo probably accomplished more of it, without it being intended, than anything else in recent memory. All over the world persons must have been asking themselves, “What enabled these men and their families to get through these harrowing months? Has it anything to do with the crucifixes and statues of saints we keep seeing, with everybody crossing themselves, with the President offering thanks to God?”
It is always example, not preaching, that works best.
