Dependencies: Good and bad

Last week, Msgr. Ignatius McDermott, a priest of the Archdiocese for 67 years, was buried from Holy Name Cathedral. He was 95 years old when he died, and he had touched many thousands of people throughout the years through his tireless work with chemically dependent and temporarily homeless people in Chicago. The Cathedral was packed not only with those who knew him personally or who worked in the institutions he founded but also with many of those he had helped over the years. Alcoholism and other drug dependencies enslave people, and Msgr. McDermott gave people back their freedom and their dignity as children of God. They had every reason to love him and to mourn his death.

Addictions create dependencies which kill. Attractions create dependencies which give life. Sometimes, at least in early stages of addiction, it’s hard to tell the difference. An addiction that plagues society today is the one which “Father Mac” helped people combat: alcohol and drug addiction. A few months ago I spent a day with a number of police officers from a Chicago suburb where drug addiction among the young is responsible for trouble with the law. I learned the paths which bring drugs to the Chicago market, where in the city drugs are most often sold to buyers from the suburbs, which age groups are most vulnerable to addiction. The personal and social havoc wreaked by people’s addiction to drugs shows up not only in police records and hospital emergency rooms but also in parishes and schools and, sometimes more quietly but with still deadly results, in homes.

The so-called “war on drugs” continues, even though publicity surrounding it has been preempted by news of other wars. People speak of a “drug culture,” because individual addiction can be fostered by an environment, sometimes shaped by music and parties. What begins as youthful experimentation, as a therapeutic aid or a pleasant social habit, too often ends in dreadful disillusion, illness and isolation. The seeming relief given by habit-forming drugs eventually breaks down a person’s sense of self as the drug-user enters a kind of twilight world, sometimes even a life of crime. Addiction to drugs becomes, objectively, a sin against human dignity and God’s loving plan for a truly human existence. Neglectful of self, the drug-user also abandons God, often substituting a chemically induced feeling of being “high” for the genuine transcendence which can be had only in relationship with God.

The Pontifical Council on the Family, in a small brochure called “From Despair to Hope,” wrote in 1992: “Drugs are not the drug-user’s main problem. Drug consumption is merely a deceptive answer to the lack of a positive meaning for life. The human person, unique and unrepeatable, with his or her own interior life and specific personality, is really at the center of the problem of drug dependence.”

Protected by financial interests and some opinion makers, drug abuse should nevertheless be seen and named clearly as the evil that it is. Over 20 years ago, during a visit to Bolivia, I got into a rather heated conversation with some individuals who were justifying the growing of various plants which produced deadly drugs. Poor people, they explained, had little choice but to produce the most profitable crop they could; and the physical and moral destruction of rich people who bought the drug was their own fault. The only truth behind such a statement is the recognition that the network of drug production and consumption runs deep and wide, creating economic as well as physical dependencies. Drugs destroy relationships between entire peoples.

Rehabilitation of a drug abuser leads him or her to recognize again their human dignity. It means coming to know why they live, die and suffer. It entails conversion. The drug-user is helped towards liberation by discovering that he or she is made in the image of God and that life, though ordinary, is full of meaning and purpose. All important in rehabilitation is the family, which possesses energies capable of taking an addict out of his anonymity and actively placing him in his uniqueness within the fabric of society. The Archdiocese, through Catholic Charities, offers the Addiction Counseling and Education Services (ACES), founded in 1962 by Msgr. McDermott. It provides outpatient counseling to adults and their families, along with educational activities for parishes, self-help groups and the community at large. In-patient or residential services can be obtained at Haymarket Center, also founded by Msgr. McDermott. In these contexts, one can begin to experience the love of the Lord, from which there is no desire to escape.

Love is never an escape; it is an attraction which is the opposite of an addiction. It liberates the lover to be always more than he would be by himself; it opens new worlds, and the love of God makes real even the promise of eternal life. Love of God is the dependency which saves the human lover. Desiring to be always with God, saturated with God, filled with his love, creates a dependency which strengthens the freedom and dignity of any person. It was this dimension of human experience which people sensed in Msgr. McDermott when they called him “a living saint.”

We pray for Msgr. Ignatius McDermott in the sure and certain hope that the Lord will be good to him; and he would have us praying, I’m sure, for all those who died in the tragedy of the tsunami of southeast Asia. Help for the survivors can be given through Catholic Relief Services (209 W. Fayette St., Baltimore, MD 21201-3443; phone (800) 736-3467; or visit www.catholicrelief.org).

For more information on substance abuse services offered by Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Chicago please call (312) 655-7453.

Sincerely yours in Christ,

Francis Cardinal George, OMI
Archbishop of Chicago

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