“BLESSED ARE”:
A EULOGISTIC HOMILY IN MEMORY OF JOHN (“FITZ”) FITZGERALD
 
Michael J. Baxter 
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church
San Francisco, California
March 9, 2024 
 
Blessed are the crowds that gathered around Jesus. Blessed are the disciples who did so too. Blessed are we who find ourselves a part of this scene, in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter five, the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes.   
 
Theologians—ancient, medieval, and modern—have regarded the Sermon on the Mount as a distillation of the Gospel—and the Beatitudes, as a distillation of the Sermon on the Mount. With its litany of blessings, delivered staccato style:
 
Blessed are the poor, in spirit;
Blessed are those mourning;
Blessed are the gentle, the meek;
Blessed are the hungry and thirsty for justice.
The merciful, the peacemakers, the persecuted.
 
Like the Joan Baez song, “Blessed Are,” which begins:
 
Blessed are the one-way ticket / holders 
On that one-way street. 
Blessed are the midnight riders
For in the shadow of God they sleep.
 
Blessed are the huddled hikers,
Staring out at falling rain, 
Wondering at the retribution
In their personal acquaintance with pain.”
 
Fitz knew this song. He had a personal acquaintance with pain. In his life, especially with the loss of his brothers Daniel and David; and in his very painful death. In being near to him in his death, Marykay and Sara have also been acquainted with this pain. In one way or another, we all have a personal acquaintance with the pain of losing Fitz. And Fitz himself had a painful life, I think, a life marked by not fitting in: being of 6’ 6” tall; being an uninhibited feeler of emotions, which men of his time didn’t naturally do; being gay, in a generation still struggling to understand the meaning of it; being a lover of music and theater and opera over sports. In the seminary, he dreaded the required recreation time, softball, basketball, and so on, but his superiors marveled at him reading the score of a musical or the libretto of an opera and humming it to himself and to those around him. His passions, his emotions, were larger than life, and oftentimes he felt alone in that.  But Fitz came to embrace not fitting in, took it as a challenge, an invitation, turned it into Good News, which he brought to so many people, to us.
 
I still remember the first time I heard Fitz preach at Deer Park, August 1978. I was new to the seminary. We at Moreau Seminary began the year there. I was wondering if I was doing the right thing, worrying about fitting in. Fitz presided at one of the daily masses, seventy of us crammed into the chapel. He preached about James and John in their boat encountering Jesus, receiving his invitation, dropping their nets, leaving home and family to follow this crazy itinerant preacher. Fitz’s words hit me so deeply that day, as they hit so many people: at Notre Dame High School in Niles, at the nearby parish of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, at the Sunday night Mass at Breen Philips, at the 12:15 Mass at Sacred Heart. I remember him preaching at Sacred Heart at the funeral Mass for Bill Toohey in October 1980, assuring us, as Bill had assured him, that the call for justice and peace was no mere nostalgia for a “distant decade” but a vision flowing from the heart of the Gospel. 
 
He brought this vision of the 1960s into so much of his preaching because he had been there, had seen it. He heard Martin Luther King, Jr. preach at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., on March 31, 1968, four days before King was assassinated. He campaigned for Bobby Kennedy, whose words he put on his ordination card: “Some people see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say, why not?” He watched from the Blackstone Hotel as Mayor Daly’s police use Billy clubs on protesters in Grant Park during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.  He brought all this into his preaching and teaching. With cities aflame with summertime race riots of the late 1960s and the war in Vietnam escalating, the body counts grimly reported each Friday on the network news, his teaching and preaching was moving, persuasive, disruptive—so much so that when he was assigned as a deacon to St. Joseph High in South Bend, his work inspired the formation of a new advocacy group called “Concerned Parents of St. Joseph High School.” Some parents didn’t appreciate his preaching and teaching.
 
But Fitz was not a sixties revolutionary. He was a sixties romantic. He went in for the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, not the S.D.S. or the Weather Underground. He was a disciple of Daniel Berrigan and Abraham Heschel, not Jerry Ruben or Abbie Hoffman. He listened to Judy Collins, Bette Midler, Barbra Streisand, not the acid rock of the Jefferson Airplane or the Grateful Dead. He went in for Verdi’s “Aida” and Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass,” not “Tommy,” the rock opera created by the The Who.” Fitz’s romanticism becomes clear with a story he often told on himself: When teaching at Notre Dame High School in Niles, he said Mass at OLPH, in the basement, every other week, switching off with Andres Gulgas, a Holy Cross priest fresh from Chile armed with the fervor of the Allende years. One time, a parishioner met with the pastor to complain about the Mass upstairs in the main Church, so the pastor suggested that he try going to Mass downstairs. “Downstairs?” the parishioner replied, “Are you kidding me? Downstairs we get either Fidel Castro or Peter Pan!”  
 
Fitz was Peter Pan—unabashedly romantic. In his teaching and preaching he wanted to move hearts. And he did move hearts. Countless students, at the two Notre Dames, the high school and the University, were moved to devote their lives to making the world more just, more peaceful, more concerned with the plight of the poor. He often told the story of Leontyne Price, the world-famous opera star, who, after an upwards turn in her career, was asked by a reporter, “what are you going to do now?”  She replied, “I’m gonna call my mama and tell her she doesn’t need to take in other peoples’ laundry anymore.” 
 
Dominican theologian Simon Tugwell says that the beatitude “blessed are the meek” is best translated as “underdog”: “Blessed are the underdogs.” These are the ones Fitz spoke up for in his preaching and teaching—and in his actions.  It was this instinct for the underdog that brought him and me together in 1984 to found Andre House in downtown Phoenix. The effort was to bring together two traditions: Holy Cross’s tradition of welcoming the poor, the lame, the suffering, embodied in Brother Andre Bessette of Montreal; and the Catholic Worker tradition of opening houses of hospitality for the poor.  For us, this combination perfect made sense. After all, Basil Moreau, the founder of the congregation of Holy Cross, had his novices memorize the Sermon on the Mount so that they would internalize it, so that it would be in them.  And Dorothy Day had declared, at the outset of World War II, “We are still pacifists. Our manifesto is the Sermon on the Mount.” 
 
As for us, we were something of an odd couple. Me, short; Fitz tall. Me, just getting started in ministry as a deacon; Fitz, in his prime as a CSC priest—with such a large following that when he sent a fundraising letter to (as he used to say) his 346 closest friends, we received $13,000 in a matter of weeks. Perhaps the biggest difference was our different MO’s or what they now call different “skill sets”: I’d be thinking of what to do six months from now; Fitz was thinking of what to do for dinner. But the combination worked, so much so that the reporter for the Arizona Republicdescribed us as “two Holy Cross priests who finish each other’s sentences.” Those early days were the best of days. Our first guests: Eric, Rick, Pitro, Mike. Our first soup line: 110 guys from “the Park,” as it was euphemistically called, lining up for turkey soup served in cups and lingering around our tables while a handful of Holy Cross Associates played guitar and led the singing. As we drove away, the guys returned to the their campfires, as Fitz later reflected, showing “a light that shines in the darkness, a light which the darkness can never put out” (John 1:5).  
 
The Beatitudes conclude with Jesus’s telling us “You are the light of the world,” urging us not to put our light under a bushel basket but on a lampstand for all to see. For three years in Phoenix, Fitz did exactly that: saying Mass at the Thunderbird School of Business, at the Maricopa County Jail, at parishes around the Valley; drawing people and groups down to the House to volunteer on the soup line, Steve Pascendi, Marcia Cartwright, Mary Lou Doran, so many others, too many to name; listening to volunteers and guests pouring out their problems and getting in return (this is how one person put it in recent weeks) total acceptance for who they were. Fitz was not one to judge others—well, maybe not if you took sides against the poor, the oppressed, the underdogs. 
 
One frequent target of Fitz’s invectives was the Governor of Arizona at the time, Evan Mecham, who blocked Martin Luther King’s birthday from becoming a state holiday. As you can imagine, Fitz was displeased, to put it mildly, and his outrage came in the form of wisecracks that were, shall we say, salty—and not in the spirit of Jesus’s words, “you are the salt of the earth.” But one relatively clean remark that can be told here in church appeared in Fitz’s entry in the House Journal for April 11, 1987, Palm Sunday. It reads as follows: “A pleasant, normal Sunday without incident, unless you count Governor Evan Mecham’s executive order today cancelling Easter as a state holiday. He found out that the Easter eggs were going to be colored.”  (His earthier jokes we’ll save for the reception.) 
 
Fitz told jokes and stories at length, many times, usually after the day was over, with a group in the back yard or on the porch of 1002 West Polk, in conversations that went late into the night. I still picture him sitting on the front porch at Andre House, or writing thank-you notes in the front office, or mixing the Wednesday night macaroni salad in a giant pot with his bare hands, or saying Mass around our big white table in the dining room, often distributing laminated parts of the Eucharistic Prayer so that all the people at the table could lead our Mass. He was not one to abide by church norms. He never hid the fact that he was called down to the chancery in Chicago for presiding at “irregular marriages.”  He happily ignored liturgical norms and rebuffed many enforcers of such norms, one of whom he used to call “Ayatollah Liturgica.”  He relished playing the role of liturgical subversive. When the Diocese of Phoenix announced that it would be hosting a visit from Pope John Paul II, Fitz wrote to the bishop suggesting that the Andre House chopping tables be used as the altar at the papal Mass in Sun Devil Stadium. That was a non-starter. 
 
But the work of Andre House was no non-starter. One time in a homily for Advent, his favorite liturgical season, Fitz told the story of a warehouse in downtown Phoenix that was once used to store weapons—bullets, artillery shells, all manner of military equipment—but had now been converted into St. Mary’s Food Bank—a guns-to-butter conversion reminiscent of the prophet Isaiah’s dream of swords being beaten into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks. That building is now the site of the Andre House soup line, its showers, clothes closet, laundry service and other services. We can only hope that the story of the transformation of that building is still being told at Andre House, and told in the hopeful, prophetic spirit that Fitz brought into the work there. 
 
He brought that same spirit to the Bay Area starting in 1988. First to Oakland, where he founded yet another Andre House and continued the work of hospitality.  I’ll never forget the story he told of taking in a guy at the Oakland house one afternoon, then asking the guy if he wanted to run errands with him for a few hours or just stay in the house; and the guy said, “I think I want to stay here; I ’haven’t been inside a house for over a year.” That sense of the outsider, being brought in. Not long after, Fitz himself became an outsider to Holy Cross, thus even more of an insider in the upside-down, hierarchy-cancelling kingdom of the Beatitudes. He continued working with the poor at the Berkeley Food and Housing Project, Loaves and Fishes, then crossed the Bay to work at the Saint Anthony Foundation in the Tenderloin. Among other things, he worked as the Justice Educator—of course he did!  Who can tell better stories than Fitz of hungering and thirsting for justice, of making peace and being persecuted like the prophets? Here he found a home. He always loved Chicago; “my kind of town,” he’d call it, often singing it. His ashes are going to be scattered over Lake Michigan. But he loved “The City of Saint Francis,” as he called it in his annual Christmas letters. He loved the people. He loved Nancy Pelosi who would serve at St. Anthony’s. He loved the restaurants. He loved the music that was available; not just at Tower Records, but where you could hear it live, at places like Davies Hall where he heard Handel’s Messiah in December. He loved the community here, was an essential part of it. 
 
Of all the images I have of Fitz, the one that most stay with me is of him serving at the soup line at The Park: standing at the table, a big ladle in his hand, greeting folks in the line by name, or by an uplifting welcome that assured them he wanted to know their names—and he would try to remember it the next time he saw you: “wait, wait, forgive me, don’t tell me, you are . . . .Joya . . . Paul . . . Marcos . . . Antonio . . . Robert . . . from . . . from . . . ”---and then he would try to recapture the conversation of the day before, make that connection, extend that welcome. He did the same with people walking up the driveway for a Friday Night Meeting, or for people stepping into a dorm room at Notre Dame, and at the many gatherings over the years in the Bay Area. He’d be doing it here right now and in the reception after—if he could.  He was always bringing people together. Always greeting people with that personal touch. Always showing his desire and ability to know each of us personally, to value us, listen to us, joke with us. Isn’t this what drew us into the world of John J. Fitzgerald, into Fitz’s blessed life and work, his smile, his laughter, his blessed tears? 
 
Amazingly, perfectly, adding his lines to the great script of the great, cosmic opera of which we are all a part, Fitz, in his last Christmas letter, written in the early weeks of Advent, told about his mother, who endured two miscarriages and two stillbirths, but then prayed a novena to Our Lady of Sorrows and (I quote) “proceeded, over the next nine years, to produce Marykay, David, me, and Daniel.” He wrote of his father making his way from Tennessee to the Windy City, getting into the cleaning business, starting his own establishment, which became Dan’s business and is now run by Dan’s stepson. This is a story of Advent hope, and we must imagine them at last gathered all together now.  
 
And we are gathered with them here, like the crowds gathered around Jesus on that mountaintop in Galilee, all of us brought together in memory of Fitz, to dwell on the words of Jesus: Blessed are the poor, the grieving,  the underdogs, those who thirst for peace and justice, who take heart and hope in everything good, who know that somewhere there’s a place for us, and who hopefully turn to face and walk in that direction: toward God. 
 
Or as Joan Baez concludes her hauntingly beautiful song “Blessed Are,” written in that distant decade long ago, in words (revised slightly) that speak to us here and now: 
 
For you and I are one-way ticket /  
Holders, on that one-way street
Which lies across a golden valley, 
Where the waters of joy and hope run deep.
 
So if you pass the parents weeping 
Of the young ones who have died, 
Take them to your warmth and keeping 
For blessed are the tears [he] cried 
And many were the years [he] tried, 
To take them to that valley wide, 
And let [our] souls be pacified.”