2nd voice

How many people search or wait in vain for loved ones gone missing who will never be found or identified. How many people long to whisper one last time a loved one’s name in a final embrace! And how many people are torn between the peace that comes from knowing and the hurt accompanying the truth! How many children are forever gone, victims hastily hidden, bodies never to be found! How many silent deaths! How many human beings are now gone missing and still being sought!

Regimes have been built on the murder of opponents and the relentless effort to erase all traces of their existence either from public records or human memory. Victims of political vendettas have gone missing and are erased for all time: denied in life, nullified in death in fully orchestrated invalidations of the dignity of the human person!

What could Joseph of Arimathaea and Jesus’s family and friends possibly hold in their arms? A corpse writes the Evangelist as if there was nothing left of Jesus but a word as cold as a dead body. But make no mistake: all who are received into the Christian community, even when disfigured, are human persons.

All life is sacred. No one’s existence can be deleted or denied even after the worst profanations and disquieting disappearances. The Christian community has learned to be watchful to ensure that all human beings will be returned to loved ones and have their true nature recognized: “As one created in the image of God, each individual human being has the dignity of a person; they are not just something but persons capable of self-knowledge, self-possession, free self-giving and entering into communion with others.”*