ST. LOUIS (CNS) — The destruction throughout Ferguson left Blessed Teresa of Calcutta parishioner and former mayor Brian Fletcher speechless.

“My heart is broken,” he wrote in an email. “Words can’t describe the near destruction of our beloved city of Ferguson.”

Hours after the Nov. 24 announcement that a grand jury wouldn’t indict Police Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown, vandals hijacked protests and violence exploded in Ferguson, overwhelming law enforcement and firefighters.

Businesses near three major intersections were looted and burned. Windows were broken at businesses near the Ferguson police department.

Firefighters arrived to fight the fires but took gunfire and withdrew for their safety. In all, 21 businesses were destroyed by fire.

Father Robert “Rosy” Rosebrough walked through the area Nov. 25, the day after the violence, and quietly blessed businesses and employees, who are now out of work. Among the discussions in the aftermath of Brown’s death, lack of economic opportunity in poor communities has been at the forefront, yet the robbing, looting and arson eliminated the source of employment and economic opportunity for many.

“My heart was very saddened and disappointed with the violence, looting and destruction of property,” Father Rosy wrote in a reflection on the Blessed Teresa website. “Many people will have no income for months. The effects of hatred, violence and hopelessness have a tremendously rippling impact upon the lives of many people.”

Father Rosy drew strength from St. Catherine of Alexandria, a fourth-century martyr whose feast day was Nov. 25.

“What struck me … was that no matter where St. Catherine was, free or in prison, she was going to be true to herself and her mission, like a piston of a motor that continually revolves, again, again and, again,” he stated. “As a rhythm ingrained in her very being, she would always offer the gift of hope and tell others of the abundant life the Jesus Christ is offering to all of humankind.”

He offered hope, something devoid of many among the protesters upset by the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Brown, an African-American, and the grand jury decision not to indict Wilson, who is white.

Protests are ongoing in Ferguson and around the country. On Dec. 1, workers and high school and college students in several cities walked off the job and away from classes to protest.

“When you are filled with hopelessness, there is no room in (your) heart to think about the consequences of (your) actions. It is in this world of brokenness that Jesus Christ came in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago.”

A news panelist “commented that many young African-American men are overwhelmed with a sense of hopelessness and have no regard for their own life or for anyone’s property,” Father Rosy wrote on his parish website. “When you are filled with hopelessness, there is no room in (your) heart to think about the consequences of (your) actions. It is in this world of brokenness that Jesus Christ came in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago.”

Father Rosy has called Ferguson the “New Bethlehem,” ground zero where change can be made in society by “leaning in,” as he said, and truly listening to the words others are saying.

“When we listen to the stories of others, when we hear their pains and frustrations and they hear ours, we discover that we are brothers and sisters,” he concluded.

There are good people in Ferguson, whether at Blessed Teresa, nearby Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish, or just people willing to help out. Pro Football Hall of Famer Aeneas Williams, the former Ram who remained in St. Louis after retirement and became a pastor, was among those helping to clean up businesses Nov. 25.

Like Father Rosy, Sister Cathy Doherty, a School Sister of Notre Dame and pastoral associate at Our Lady of Guadalupe, walked around Ferguson in the aftermath of the violence and observed “lots of good people helping everyone.”

Though heartbroken now, Fletcher has hope that Ferguson will rebound from this, just as it did in recent years with massive destruction by tornadoes.

“I believe God only gives us what we can handle,” stated Fletcher, chairman of the “I Love Ferguson” committee. “From the ashes, we will rise a better and stronger Ferguson. God Bless Ferguson. … Let’s show the world the power of peace and unity.”

— By Dave Luecking, Catholic News Service. Luecking writes for the St. Louis Review, newspaper of the St. Louis Archdiocese.

ST. LOUIS (CNS) — Among the iconic images of the 9/11 tragedy, photographs of policemen and firefighters stand out: The first responders were entering the doomed World Trade Center as most everyone else was filing out.

They embraced the danger of the moment, most going ultimately to their death, because the job requires it. First-responders sign up for this risk; they accept it as part of their service.

Similarly, in the situation that has become known as simply “Ferguson,” Sgt. John Wall of the St. Louis County Police Department knew in the second week of August that the time had come to stand up and be counted. Peaceful protests after the Aug. 9 shooting death of Michael Brown by a police officer during a confrontation had devolved into rioting and looting.

A QuikTrip near the shooting site had been looted and burned. Police had lobbed tear gas and shot rubber bullets to disperse crowds, presumably while real bullets flew in their direction. The situation was fraught with danger.

But did Wall think twice about going into it? Nope.

“I volunteered,” he said, on a recent morning at a coffee shop.

“I volunteered; it was kind of ‘all hands on deck,’ so everybody had to work it at some time,” he explained, matter-of-factly. He added, “I was fortunate enough to work it the entire time.”

Wall, a 50-year-old married father of a teenager, not only volunteered for duty, willfully taking the risk, but counted himself as fortunate for being there.

This from a man who in 12-hour shifts on his two weeks of voluntary duty was spit on, was hit by rocks, bricks and bottles of urine, and was berated — with protesters calling him every name in the book.

“In those two weeks, I was called more things than in the 25 years I’ve been in this business,” said Wall, who became a police officer in 1989 and joined the county force in 1998. “I’ve worked narcotics, I’ve worked homicide and I’ve never been talked to like that. Ever.”

In those moments, his Catholic faith guided Wall, particularly the part about loving thy neighbor.

“Faith comes into every aspect of this job. You have to forgive.”

“Faith comes into every aspect of this job,” said Wall, who became a Catholic in 1991. “You have to forgive. I can’t personally hold a grudge against any of these people; they were not screaming at me as an individual. I understand, and most of us understand, they’re looking at a uniform and not a face. They don’t know me and everything that I stand for.

“You have to have forgiveness in your own heart,” he told the St. Louis Review, the archdiocesan newspaper, in an interview some days before the grand jury handed down its decision that there would be no indictment of the police officer who killed.

When Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson, who is white, fatally shot 18-year-old Brown, an African-American, racial unrest in the St. Louis suburb led to protests. Some demonstrators looted and burned local businesses.

When it was announced that after three months of looking at the evidence and hearing more than 70 hours of testimony, the grand jury declined to indict Wilson, violent protests followed. Protests have continued in Ferguson and across the country.

From the beginning, Wall and fellow officers have leaned on the pastoral care of county police chaplains. Chaplains started each shift with a prayer before the officer’s role call and briefing at the police command center. Catholic priests served among chaplains of many religions.

“No one went to church for two weeks either; you’re working the whole time. So, it was very helpful to have the chaplains there,” Wall said.

The prospect of having Mass or other religious services at the command post was out of the question. Work consumed the officers, for one, and it wasn’t safe anyway. Bomb threats prompted Gov. Jay Nixon to call out the National Guard to protect the command center and make it a safe haven for officers.

The scene of the unrest on the quarter-mile stretch of West Florissant in Ferguson was unsafe. A native of St. Louis, Wall describes the venom directed at him and other officers in Ferguson as “unbelievable,” particularly since he knew, or at least recognized, some of the people hurling insults.

“The people we took it from were … people I had good relations with,” he said, adding that he gave those people the benefit of the doubt. “There were people that just got caught up in the heat of the moment.”

The protesters “came from all walks of life — young, old, ministers,” Wall said, noting that one woman among the latter “really laid into me, saying things like how we mistreat people, how we beat people, how we should be ashamed of ourselves, and all the people that I’ve killed. I was just looking at her. I haven’t killed anybody. I haven’t fired my gun in 25 years as a police officer. Been shot at, though.”

“You just have to gut through it.”

It’s a tough time for the men and women in uniform and their families, but Wall’s attitude is to grin-and-bear it. “You just have to gut through it.”

For all of the bad Wall has experienced in Ferguson, he also has experienced much good, starting with people closest to him — “family members, friends and people of the parish.”

People also have come up to him while he’s in uniform and thanked him for being a police officer.

In the meantime, Wall’s wife and daughter worry about his safety in Ferguson.

“My family has worried way more than I’d like them to,” Wall said, adding, “I know how to take care of myself and take care of my people. They don’t need to worry about me.”

Thoughts of his wife and daughter are with Wall at all times; he has only to look at the two rings he wears on the little finger of his right hand. From his wife, he has a ring with crosses. From his daughter, he has a rosary ring. He also carries a rosary in his duty bag, hands out St. Michael the Archangel prayer cards and wears a St. Michael pendant that his wife gave him 24 years ago. St. Michael is the patron saint for policemen, and even non-Catholic officers wear the medals and carry the prayer cards in their pockets.

“Almost every policeman will have a religious trinket of some kind,” Wall said. “Faith is huge in the police department, and in the military, too. It’s a big presence.

“Like a minister, a policeman is there for good.”

— By Dave Luecking, Catholic News Service. Luecking writes for the St. Louis Review, newspaper of the St. Louis Archdiocese.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Ankara and Istanbul were gray and cold, at least compared to Rome, during Pope Francis’ Nov. 28-30 visit to Turkey. And the general reception, outside of the pope’s official meetings, was hardly warmer. There were none of the enthusiastic crowds that usually greet him on his trips, no masses waving signs of welcome along his motorcade route or behind police barriers at the stops.

Pope Francis, who seems to thrive on contact with the public, especially with the young, the aged and the infirm, seemed dispirited by the lack of it this time. Despite his relatively light schedule — six speeches over three days, compared to 14 during his three-day visit to the Holy Land in May — he looked attentive but increasingly weary at his public appearances.

There was an obvious reason, unrelated to the pope himself, for the general indifference to his presence. An observer did not need to know that Turkey is 99.8 percent Muslim to see that both cities he visited are dotted with the domes and minarets of countless mosques, miniature versions of the great monuments, Hagia Sofia and the Blue Mosque, that he toured in Istanbul.

Even a brief experience of Christianity’s marginality in that part of world makes it easier to understand why Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, whom Pope Francis traveled to Turkey principally to see, is the papacy’s best friend in the Orthodox Church and an eager participant in ecumenical dialogue.

Although Patriarch Bartholomew is traditionally considered first among equals by Orthodox bishops, his Greek Orthodox flock in Turkey is estimated at no more than 4,000 people, fewer than in many American Catholic parishes. Turkish authorities have kept his church’s only seminary closed for more than 40 years. Just across the border, in Syria and Iraq, Christian minorities are being slaughtered or driven from their homes by militants of the Islamic State.

Under such circumstances, it is no wonder that Patriarch Bartholomew would tell Pope Francis Nov. 30: “We no longer have the luxury of isolated action. The modern persecutors of Christians do not ask which church their victims belong to. The unity that concerns us is regrettably already occurring in certain regions of the world through the blood of martyrdom.”

In other words, necessity is the mother not only of invention but ecumenism, which also makes it easier to understand why Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, who leads tens of millions of Russian Orthodox and is closely allied with his nation’s government, can maintain his predecessors’ stance of refusing even to meet with the bishop of Rome.

Rome obviously is a far less lonely place than Istanbul to be a Christian. But Pope Francis follows St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI in recognizing that the West is, increasingly, Christian only in name. His Nov. 25 visit to the European institutions in Strasbourg, France, where he arrived to find the streets practically empty, was a recent reminder of that reality in the church’s traditional heartland.

The impressions of Christian culture that the Muslim world encounters through globalization are not the work of missionaries. Leaving Turkey’s Presidency of Religious Affairs in Ankara after the pope’s visit there Nov. 28, reporters passed a luxury shopping mall decorated with lighted Christmas trees (reminding an American present that it was Black Friday in the U.S.).

In response to the secularism of Europe and other wealthy societies, Pope Francis has taken a different tack than his two immediate predecessors. The current pope denounces a “throwaway” culture of abortion, euthanasia, unemployment, economic inequality and environmental pollution. But he rarely speaks of secularism, and his teaching focuses less on the failings of contemporary society and more on the church’s own shortcomings as impediments to evangelization.

Whatever the advantages of this pastoral strategy, Pope Francis clearly does not expect short-term results in Europe, which he described to the politicians in Strasbourg as a “grandmother, no longer fertile and vibrant” but “elderly and haggard.”

To see the church’s future now, the pope must look elsewhere, such as the Philippines, where in 1995 St. John Paul celebrated a single Mass in Manila with a congregation of more than 5 million.

Pope Francis travels there in January.

— By Francis X. Rocca, Catholic News Service.