He fathered a child with the head of the Washington office of his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. According to Time Magazine, it was an admission which came only because the National Enquirer was ready to break the story that he paid his paramour $35,000 in hush money and contributes $3,000 a month support. DNA established his paternity.  Jack E. White, writing in Time Magazine about the sordid affair, summed it up nicely: “Set aside for the moment the strutting hypocrisy revealed by Jesse Jackson’s confession last week that in 1998, at the very moment he was providing pastoral counseling to the White House’s resident adulterer, he was carrying on an extramarital affair of his own. Focus instead on his stupidity: How could the nation’s premier civil rights leader have been so reckless? Of course, that’s the same question everybody was asking about Bill Clinton in 1998. But at least Clinton isn’t a minister.”

Yes, those of us who are ordained ministers are expected to live the standard we preach. When we preach The Way, we should live it. If not practicing it, we should not be preaching it. Moreover, when not practicing what we preach, we should lose the title Reverend. And most assuredly we are not martyrs, just hypocrites.

For example, in January while I was visiting the British Commonwealth island nation of Saint Lucia, I learned about Sister Theresa. She is a present-day martyr, an Irish Nun of the Holy Family, who was in the habit of living The Way—a habit that led to her death.

Sister Theresa was born Christina Mary Egan on 27 December 1927 in Clonaslee County, Laoise, Ireland. She made her First Profession at the age of 22 in March 1949. Her first Mission was Trinidad in April 1949, then to Grenada in 1958. In January 1958, she was appointed Head Teacher of the “Ave Maria” School in Castries, Saint Lucia. Except for a year at Oxford University and a year at Maynoth College, Ireland, Sister Theresa spent her life ministering to the Caribbean people.

Sister had retired but remained on the Island to teach religion and to help persons with learning disabilities, teaching them reading skills. She had a profound influence on the community. Also “She was humble and soft-spoken,” recalls Sr. Paula.

It was a peaceful Sunday morning on December 31, 2000 as Sister Theresa and the six residents of the Convent and about 400 worshipers kneeled in their pew after communion during the 6:00 am Mass at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. They were oblivious to the world around them, focused on the Spirit within them.

The Presider, Father Charles Gaillard and a Eucharistic Minister, Victor Reyes, were putting the Blessed Sacrament in the tabernacle when suddenly the after communion peacefulness was shattered. In the back of the cathedral, pandemonium erupted as worshipers screamed and scrambled in every which direction amid fire and smoke. People were clubbed, splashed with gasoline and set on fire by two terrorists.

Within seconds, Father, the altar, and the Eucharistic Minister were aflame, too. The resulting carnage left scores injured, twelve people hospitalized with severe burns, and their beloved native priest near death.

The seven nuns fled outside through the Sacristy and then in different directions. Sister Theresa and several lay people ran head-on into one of the terrorists exiting the church. She stood out from the rest. She was wearing her habit. She represented the Church. He bludgeoned her to death and fled, leaving her frail, lifeless body lying on the sidewalk in a pool of blood. Members of the congregation apprehended her assassin a short distance from the church and held him for the Police.

Twenty-year-old Kim John, a member of the Rastafarian Sect, which preaches anti-Roman Catholicism as the way, was charged with Sister Theresa’s murder. He claimed that JAH (the sect’s almighty-god) had instructed him to destroy the Catholic Church, starting with the Cathedral. (Twenty-years earlier Kim John had been baptized there.)

We pity the hypocrite. We pray for the apostate. We mourn the martyr.