Berkley Center

Background: On July 2nd, 2014, Daniel Varghese, an undergraduate student in the Walsh School of Foreign Service class of 2017, interviewed Father Michael Calabria, O.F.M. Fr. Calabria is a Franciscan friar who acts as a chaplain-in-residence at Georgetown while pursuing his doctorate in Qur'anic studies. In this conversation, Calabria talks about the call he received to join the Order of Friars Minor (Franciscans) and his journey that led him to Georgetown.

Your undergraduate experience and subsequent studies and works poised you to be a traditional academic. What changed within you that made you want to join the Franciscans?

It was really my experience living in New York that changed things, that shifted my focus to the pastoral world. I moved to New York in 1985 and was living and working in New York until I entered the order in 1996. And during that time, the homeless situation in New York was pretty bad and very visible. I experienced it on a daily basis, riding on the subway and working in Manhattan.

The single most transformative moment, for me, happened in winter on my way to work. There were about two to three inches of snow on the ground. I dressed for work in my usual attire, suit and tie. I put on an overcoat and headed off to the subway. As soon as I got on the subway car in Brooklyn, I was hit with a smell. The smell, familiar to all New Yorkers, meant that a homeless person was on the car. Sure enough, I looked to the end of the car, and there was a woman, who was barely attired, no shoes and very minimal clothing.

I looked at her and thought, Oh my God, what can I do? At the very least, I thought, I could give her my overcoat. I still had on a suit jacket and I could go to Macy’s during my lunch break and just buy a nicer coat. And so I think, how am I going to do this so that I don’t offend her? What words would I use to approach her?

The subway pulled into the station where I had to transfer. And I got off the subway and made my transfer having done nothing. And that haunts me to this day. That I did not do anything to help that woman. I really think that my focus was shifting.

The questions arose in my mind. How is it that I have so much and others have so little? Does God love some people more than others? That idea to me was unthinkable. The only answer that I could come up with was that I had received much in my life, in order to put that at the service of others. And that was my foundation for my discernment with the friars.

The process of joining the Franciscans involves multiple steps and is unique for each friar. What did this process look like for you and how did it shape your perspective?

The process for me began when I went to visit the friary at 31st Street in Manhattan. I asked to speak to a friar. So he came out and I told him the kinds of things I was experiencing and that I was feeling the call to the vocation. The friar was very cautious; he told me to take some time and get involved with the activities of the ministry. So that’s exactly what I did until I got to the point that I really wanted to make a much deeper commitment. I didn’t want to live my life for myself, but I wanted to put my abilities at the service of others in a concerted way.

It was a huge decision. It was easy in that I was pretty sure that that’s what I wanted to do, but it meant a huge life change. I entered the order when I was 35, and by that time you get used to being an independent person being in full control of your life. Suddenly I was surrendering all of that to the order. The decision was easy, but the reality wasn’t so easy.

For my first year—at the time we called it an affiliate year, now they call it a postulate year—I lived with a community of friars in the Bronx. It’s a year of trying things out. To see if this is really what you want to do. During this time, I taught religious education in a Catholic elementary school, part time. My students were fourth and fifth graders, who came from very difficult home situations. One of their parents might have been in prison, might have been in treatment for alcoholism or drug addiction, might have been sick from AIDS, or might even have been dead. Several of my students were being raised by their grandparents or an aunt or uncle. This experience in the first year of the order helped to show me the reality of people’s lives by putting me in contact with people that I would never have met in the academic world.

This continued in my following novitiate year, when I did hospital ministry at a hospital in Fall River, Massachusetts. I encountered people with very serious illnesses, including patients with AIDS. As I came into contact with people that I never imagined I would encounter, I learned to see people as people. Not by their social class, not by their occupation, but as people.

I took these lessons with me as I entered my pastoral year, the year before we take our solemn vows. During this year, you don’t do any studies, and you focus on your ministry. I asked to go to Egypt, the land which I had previously studied, to work in a leprosarium: a clinic for people with leprosy. It was a year that really taught me to see the beauty of individuals, beyond all of the things by which we ordinarily measure people. I was confronted with the reality of human suffering and forced to make sense of it and peace with it.

The experience here, as part of my formation as a friar, helped me move beyond barriers and allowed me to see God in the world. In life, we put up barriers. We set limits for ourselves and say what we will and will not do and between us and other people. We say, "I’ll only deal with this kind of person. I’m not going to deal with the poor or I’m not going to deal with the rich." During this year, all of these barriers were broken down for me. I learned to move beyond my own limitations.

I remember the first day I got to the leprosarium; I saw the nurses and workers cutting away at the dead flesh around the lepers’ lesions, so that they could heal. And I thought, I’ll be happy to change bandages, but I’m not going to be cutting away at people’s flesh with scissors. The weeks pass, months pass. One day, I was kneeling on the floor of the leprosarium, working on a lesion on the sole of someone’s foot. And there I was, cutting the dead skin from around the man’s lesions. Everything went into slow motion, and I recalled saying that I would not do this.

And at that point, I realized that I was not in control. There was something beyond me, moving me across those boundaries that I had set for myself. That is what I call the Holy Spirit. For me, the Holy Spirit is that which moves us beyond our own limitations. It allows us to realize our divine potential.

What does it mean to be a Franciscan friar?

Franciscan friars endeavor to follow Jesus Christ in the manner of St. Francis, who was born in the Italian city of Assisi in 1182. Francis had a comfortable and carefree life as the son of a textile merchant until he joined in Assisi’s war against the neighboring city of Perugia and was captured. After his release and through an ensuing illness, Francis experienced a conversion prompting him to leave his comfortable life as a merchant’s son, abandon all property and marks of social status to care for the sick, the poor, and those living on the margins of society, and to witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ by embracing every one and indeed every created thing as brother and sister. Ministry to and solidarity with the poor and marginalized have remained hallmarks of the Franciscan charism, as have issues of peace, justice, and integrity of creation.

How did you end up as a chaplain-in-residence at Georgetown?

Once I was ordained, I went to teach at St. Bonaventure University in Allegheny, New York and was there from 2003 to 2012. It was during that time that I started a program in Arabic and Islamic studies. I had gotten to a point, in developing that program with numerous courses in the Arabic language as well as in Islamic history and culture, where I needed a terminal degree in order to move this program forward.

I wanted to continue to teach, at least part time. I knew about a program through the University of Exeter, which I could do as a distance learner, while teaching at St. Bonaventure. I did this for a year before realizing that it was really difficult to do both. Although I had reduced my course load to half, it was still taking up more than half of my time, not giving me enough quality time to work on my research.

That’s when I decided I needed to go some place to work on my dissertation full-time that also provided me the resources to do that. Georgetown fit the bill perfectly, because of the library resources, because of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. The chaplain-in-residence program was perfect because it would allow me to live in Georgetown and avail myself of the resources, while still allowing me to do pastoral work. For me, it was a perfect combination.

As a Catholic friar whose academic area of expertise is the Arabic world and Islam, what do you believe is your role in fostering interfaith dialogue?

My personal life has been inspired by the example of St. Francis. When I became a friar and learned that Francis had gone to Egypt, I thought, "Here is what I had been called to do." It was as if my universes were colliding. Francis traveled to Egypt in order to ostensibly engage in a peaceful dialogue with the sultan during the crusades. This is the model I have for engagement with the Islamic world.

Beyond that, the example of Francis illustrates a man of very strong Catholic faith who was able to see the beauty within a tradition that he was taught to hate. Francis couldn’t do that because he could see the goodness and beauty in Islam, even though it wasn’t of his faith. Furthermore, we have all these indications that Francis was inspired by things Islamic. The gift of the Franciscan charism is that I can look in other cultures and traditions and see beauty. And for me, wherever you find beauty and goodness and truth speaks of the divine.

So, I sort of see myself as one bridge between Christian and Muslim communities. To show them the many things that we have in common with one another as people of faith, even with the different histories that we’ve had.

How can we, as students, become interfaith leaders?

Given the current makeup of the United States and the majority of other nations on the face of the Earth, you are going to meet people of other faith traditions on a daily basis, wherever you go. You can choose to adopt an attitude that says I have nothing to learn from them and I don’t care to learn anything from them. But that, to me, is sub-human. You are cutting yourself off from parts of the creation that God has made. The world is full of beauty in many forms.

If people are simply open to seeing the wisdom, beauty, and truth in other people, regardless of faith traditions, regardless of culture, regardless of ethnicity, we’d have a much better and peaceful world. It’s only when we start shutting ourselves off from those things, when we say that we have them all, that we get into serious difficulties. All that it takes for us to change things is for us to recognize that we don’t know it all, we haven’t seen it all, and that we have a lot to learn about ourselves, about people, and about God.