Before the start of Mass in a Mexican town last week, a wounded American bishop looked into a sea of teenage girls who had, he’d been told, been hurt in inhumane ways. Three thousand or so girls stood before him at Villa de Las Niñas in blue skirts, white blouses, bobby socks, and black saddle shoes. These were Mexico’s bullied ones from Guerrero, Oaxaca, Durango, Veracruz, Puebla, Jalisco, and numberless other poor villages.
In the silence of the mammoth gymnasium, the wounded looked into the eyes of the wounded. Sorrow wrung the bishop’s heart. A few sisters had told him stories of their spiritual daughters’ afflictions, so his eyes moistened as he blessed himself to begin the Sacrifice of the Mass. The abandoned girls were raised in villages bathed in human trafficking, murder, addiction, and violence.
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Girlstown was the right place for the bishop to be last week. Although the girls had been hurt in unspeakable ways, the bishop also knew he had been pulled into a humble kingdom of resurrection, where endless lines of girls stood like thousands of Jairus’ daughters—dead, risen, and looking for how to move forward. With clasped hands and their eyes turned to the bishop they didn’t know, he blessed himself, in persona Christi, to begin the Mass.
En el nombre del Padre y del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo.
The girls were startled. This American spoke in their tongue—fluently! And far, far away, seemingly thousands of rows from the altar in the rear, 46 Sisters of Mary smiled. The sisters knew their forsaken daughters would begin to see him as one of their own, though not in the ways and the depth they could have known.
The bishop was commissioned by Pope Benedict in 2012 to go forth and pastor flocks, bear fruit, and bring the leaven of the Gospel to the mistreated, broken, and alienated. Since being relieved by Pope Francis as shepherd of Tyler, Texas, last fall, Bishop Joseph Strickland has had to tend to those very wounds in himself.
The Whisky Priest in The Power and the Glory comes to mind. It’s the broken and marginalized—the outcasts—who know the injustice of mankind and push on despite it. Like Graham Greene’s fugitive priest stumbling from place to place through the night to calm the frightened in the faith-starved homes of Tabasco, Bishop Strickland now moves on the peripheries. With a heart consumed with shepherding and fulfilling his sacramental duties—and with forces bearing down upon him—he searches out places of trauma, like Girlstown, to bring healing. It’s the broken best able to heal the broken; and it is by their fruit that they will be known.
Before Venerable Aloysius Schwartz died of ALS in 1992, he urged the religious order he founded to serve by wearing “a constant crown of thorns.” When the Sisters of Mary heard the bishop’s Spanish, they may have wondered if he’d make the choice to join in. They knew his gift of Spanish could better reach their spiritual daughters’ wounds.
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When the army of girls began dispersing from the gymnasium after Mass, a tiny girl who brought to mind Cindy Lou Who craned her neck and whispered with saucer-eyes: Padre, podrías escuchar mi confesión? The bishop smiled and led her to a quiet place in a corner for confession. Thereafter, a line formed that seemed to stretch to the American border wall; the wounded waited to be healed, one by one, by the wounded healer.
Yes, the sisters knew then, he would wear their crown. They didn’t know he already wore one.
“These girls come here broken, and the Sisters of Mary pray and work hard to heal their trauma” Bishop Strickland said. “The wounded become healed here by women who want no fanfare. It is the work of God.”
For the next five days, the bishop entered into, dissolved, and became one with girls with Mexico’s deepest wounds. They began to seek him out for confession and walk the oval track with him; some hesitantly told stories from their childhoods that remain like houses of horror in their minds. They shed tears, and the bishop’s eyes glistened. Each child at Girlstown, in some fashion, has been beaten down by poverty and physical, mental, and sexual abuse. The Sisters of Mary travel each year to their villages, two-by-two, as rescuers of girls who’ve endured magnificent evil.
