Brody Hale cannot see, but he relates to the world in ways that many of us could only imagine. Blind since birth due to Leber’s Congenital Amaurosis (LCA), Brody Hale practices law: estate planning, social entrepreneurship, and real estate, along with handling other small client matters. These practice areas are common for a solo practitioner living in a small town, but Brody Hale is no small town lawyer. He is known throughout the United States as an expert in canon law. He works to save Catholic Churches that have been threatened with closure.
Born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts on August 19, 1985, Brody Hale is a young man tempered by a soul that has been well honed by having grown up without sight. He lives in the tiny town of Tyringham, in the Berkshire Mountains, population 427 (2020 Census). The oldest of three, he has two younger sisters. He was raised by his Mom, a devout Catholic and a single parent.
He went to the local public schools and graduated from Tufts University with a B.A. in history and political science. He joined Teach for America and taught middle school (6th, 7th and 8th grades) for two years. Later he went to Boston College Law School, and then on to Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, where he received an MPA.
This is the stark biodata about Brody Hale, but the story of his life gives definition to the true meaning of Catholicity—universality, completeness, wholeness. Where there is wholeness, claim can also be made that Brody Hale can see far better than those who are born with sight.
One way he explores the world is through touch. When he was a small child of three, his father brought him to the circus and got him to pet an elephant named Lisa. “I remember the elephant’s skin felt like sandpaper,” he said. He used his small hands to traverse the wholeness of the animal. The feel of the elephant’s sandpapery skin stayed with him. He also remembers going to the fish market and touching lobster. His father understood that touch was one way his son was able to learn.
“The sense of touch defines the contours of the world,” Brody said. Touch is the major sense that he relies upon. That’s why Braille is what it is—giving people without sight the ability to read.
When Brody was in high school, he visited Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s home, his Springwood estate in Hyde Park, New York. Springwood is the birthplace, lifelong home and burial site of FDR. The staff gave Brody cloth gloves and a personal guided tour throughout the residence to touch the objects there.
In a crowded room, it is virtually impossible for Brody to learn where people are. Even when speaking to people at close range, it might not be possible for him to know who is there. Brody has never judged someone based on how they look. Race, religion, ethnicity do not come into play.
It is the same as if he were to attempt to admire the foliage among a copse of trees. “I don't know the colors of leaves,” he said. “They're too small and too indistinct.”
The sense of touch reigns supreme as he navigates his way through life. “I perceive the world by feeling it to the degree that I can. I cannot really understand the dimensions of something unless I feel it.”
The relationship between the bean and the bush
Since he was five-years-old, he had been wondering whether coffee beans grow on a bush or a tree. When he was in Jamaica on a research trip during graduate school, he visited a coffee plantation and remembers being in the midst of torrential downpour. He told the staff that he wanted to feel how coffee beans attach to bushes. A Jamaican man led him into the field in the midst of the downpour, guiding him to touch the beans growing on the bushes. After twenty-five years, he finally understood the relationship between the beans and the bush.
Scent is a way to perceive the world, but it is localized and does not reveal the dimensionality of the objects within a given space and how the contours of those objects define the parameters of a place. “I know when flowers are there, but I don’t identify the flower’s location,” he said.
Brody once told a Trinidadian friend he wanted to see how coconuts attached to trees. Brody and his friend both taught at the same University when he was in Korea. He often told his friend if he ever had the chance to visit her family’s home in Trinidad, they would have to figure how to rig a ladder to the coconut tree so he could climb to the top.
He grew up in the middle of nowhere, four miles to the nearest store, no sidewalks on the road. There weren’t any blind people to serve as role models. He felt trapped and wondered where his life was going. His father was not there for him. An alcoholic—the disease ultimately took his life. It is painful for Brody to talk about his father.
He read about Helen Keller, Annie Sullivan, and others. His mother was good about mainstreaming him through life; consequently, he did not lean heavily on the identity of being a blind person. He participated in camps for the visually impaired that taught life skills, but he felt disconnected from his environment, and he always felt that he was different—analytical, cerebral, curious, he felt driven to learn about the world beyond his small town.
One of his escapes was NPR, especially the program All Things Considered. Both NPR and PBS were his liaison to the news; listening to their programming opened the floodgates to knowledge. “NPR really helped me understand the world,” he said.
Moving about the world unhampered and freely, led by what he can see, is not possible. Brody said, “I can see things super large and super close. I’m not going to catch 95% of what is around me.” Outdoors, he walks with a white cane. He recounts one evening when he was walking on the road leading to his home, his mother drove to pick him up because there was a bear on the front lawn.
While his blindness has closed some doors, other doors have opened. His intellect has allowed him to be very analytical. He has been forced to spend a lot of time in his head. He is aware that he might be perceived as dismissive or arrogant, so he strives to be thoughtful about what he is doing. He has trained himself to think through issues, and every issue is different. He works diligently and patiently to be aware of what other people are thinking or feeling, and appreciates the reciprocity when his feelings are also acknowledged. “I want to understand how people feel.”
His listening skills are superb. He hears what people say and is able to retain volumes of information; and he has trained his mind to be a prodigious memory bank. Many have commented to him, “You remember a lot.”
He is comfortable in the world around him, exploring new frontiers that are out of the reach of many sighted people. It wasn’t until he went to college that he met people from all over the world who he had only heard about on NPR.
Blindness is still stigmatized
A lot of people view blindness as a disqualifying trait. He recalls when Cyrus Habib was running for Washington State’s Lieutenant Governor, people questioned his ability to serve. (Habib has been fully blind since he was eight years old.)
In mentioning Cyrus Habib, there is a certain irony in the fact that Habib did not run for re-election and instead became a Catholic priest, a Jesuit. If Catholicism is a glue that knits the world of those without sight, then it is entirely possible they are seeing something the rest of us might need to see.
How he became involved in saving churches
Brody Hale has spent over a decade providing consulting services internationally to those who have sought to preserve historic Catholic churches. His mission to save churches, albeit sacred places, has emerged from a confluence of circumstances and is not borne of a single epiphany.
Brody’s Mom, born into an ultra strict Catholic family, is mostly Italian. She grew up to idolize priests and nuns, and believed that the church could do no wrong. She went to a Catholic nursing school. Four generations of his family were parishioners at St. Francis of Assisi on Route 102 in the south Lee neighborhood of Lee, Massachusetts. Brody was an altar boy when he was ten. And while his Catholic faith took circuitous turns through the years, the closing and sale of the church was devastating to both him and his mother. “We don't talk about it,” he said.
Today St. Francis of Assisi is an art gallery, showing a hodgepodge of eclectic and contemporary art.
Even before he graduated from college in Boston, he saw what was happening to Catholic Churches. He had been involved with saving churches since 2004, but he was not leading the crusade. Soon he would begin to look at what was happening beyond Massachusetts.
Before he became a lawyer, his innate curiosity led him to explore the Teach for America program in New Orleans. Next stop: Korea, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. While he had always been involved with the Catholic Church, his relationship had always been a delicate dance, and he did not want his work saving churches to define him.
Teach for America
A friend, who was involved with Teach for America, asked Brody what he planned to do after college. He said, “Well, there's something that I believe you need to be doing—Teach for America.” Brody remembers that date as vividly as if it had happened yesterday; it was the day he graduated from Tufts University—Sunday, May 20th, 2007.
Teach for America was interesting to him. The idea of serving children in underserved areas struck a chord. He had been the first in his family to go to college. He really felt that Teach for America would give him an opportunity to pay it forward to the next generation of students.
There was a great need for teachers in New Orleans. This was post Hurricane Katrina. He was fascinated by the history of New Orleans and its Catholicism. He was willing to go somewhere where the Catholic population came from French colonial settlers in the early 18th and 19th centuries. Brody Hale didn’t think other “teachers” were thinking of New Orleans as a “Catholic city,” but he did. “I wanted to be of service,” Brody said. “I wanted to be of use to the world.”
He taught middle school for two years, grades 6, 7 and 8. Certified to teach English, he also taught social studies and science. “I was a blind teacher in a school of sighted students,” he said. During his second year teaching, he was the only social studies teacher for grades 6,7,8. Social studies was not a subject the school cared about it because it wasn’t part of the Louisiana standardized test called the LEAP. The students knew they wouldn’t be tested on history, so they weren’t motivated to learn.
His students had so many things stacked against them. Brody remembers the fourteen-year-old boy who struggled in the seventh grade due to deficits in reading and writing. Later, after he was no longer Brody’s student, the boy was killed. He had been visiting his girlfriend when her mother came home unexpectedly, found him hiding in the closet, and stabbed him to death.
One student whose family was homeless spent the holidays couch surfing. Brody asked her where she would be staying at Christmas so he could send her a tin of pirouettes—just one more way he could sweeten her love of learning. He wanted to encourage her to become educated because he knew that was the only way out of poverty.
Brody’s experience teaching children who were at risk led to many sleepless nights and left an indelible imprint.
The Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program
Brody always seems to pick the most challenging pursuits, almost as if he is being called to do what others could not do. In Korea, he did the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program teaching conversational English to university students. He said, “It was the happiest year of my life in terms of exposing me to the most unique situations and things.”
He is comfortable seeking new experiences no matter how far afield they might seem to other more reticent souls. One night when he was in South Korea, he was out and about, looking for a place to get a haircut. Soon his entreaties got attention. A Korean man, clearly inebriated, dragged him into a dark building to a stairwell devoid of any trace of light. The man literally pulled Brody up the stairs, where at the top there was a beauty shop. Brody was incredulous that he could be in this remote place where there was a beauty shop, for women as it turned out. His hair was cut by someone who had had never before cut a man’s hair.
Not having sight has allowed him to discover what others could not see. “I have less inhibition about putting myself into unique situations,” he said. “There are all sorts of perils in the world. I try to be as adventurous as I can without being in danger.”
Pivoting to Law
He was curious about law because of a formative experience from listening to Judge Wapner of People’s Court on television. His mother’s sister married a lawyer. He knew that lawyers present information and they argue points—both skills appealed to his intellect steeped in logic as well as his sense of fair play. There were obstacles. The LSAT wasn’t offered in braille. His mother helped him to prepare, spending hours every day for about six months. The test questions had to be read to him.
Becoming a lawyer was no less daunting than being a blind teacher among sighted students. According to Brody, there were only 600 blind teachers and only 400 blind lawyers in America. He seemed to be imbued with an extra sense: of knowing when to trust his gut and knowing when not to.
The Stigma Against Blind People
All along he has experienced the stigma that sighted people have against blind people. He had a professor in college that once said, “I give you a lot of credit for doing what you're doing as a blind person. If I went blind, I think I'd commit suicide because I just can't imagine what it’s like.”
Society often underestimates people who are visually impaired. There is a lot of fear. When he was in the Fulbright program, one of his colleagues, who was walking beside him at a park, said, “I’ve never walked next to a blind person before. I'm really nervous. I hope I'm doing this correctly.”
When he was teaching in Korea as a Fulbright Scholar, he had a student in class who said, “If you were my child, I would have aborted you, so I wouldn't have had to deal with you.” When Brody asked her why she would have done that, she told him, “Well, because it would just be too much of an inconvenience in my life to have a blind child.” Brody asked the other students in the class if they disagreed. And they said, “No, we all agree, because we don’t want a blind child.” Five minutes later, the students invited Brody to join them for ice cream after class.
In his second year of law school, a professor offered to help her students who were seeking clerkships and career counseling. She told the students to visit her after class. She’d be more than happy to help! When Brody sought her counsel, she said, “I don’t know if I can help you. I’ve never had a blind student before and I don’t even understand or know how you would use a phone.” Never mind that he had called her on his phone on another occasion.
Experiences that cause him pain are assuaged by his deep faith. “I am grateful for my faith,” he said. He believes that when we die, we will be judged by what we have done and what we have failed to do. The whole notion of the reconciliation and confession, and then communion, sustains him. “If we want to get to heaven and stay right with God, we need to confess our sins, and ask for forgiveness.”
The idea of reconciliation and its power is profoundly meaningful to him. He wants to do what he needs to do to be on the right side of God. “God took the time to create me and create the planet,” he said. “And I do love God.”
He believes in the Eucharist—that is what is at the center of Catholicism. No other Christian faith has the Doctrine of Transubstantiation. He believes the bread and wine offered during the Catholic Mass do indeed become the body and blood of Jesus Christ. “Eucharistic miracles do happen that cannot be explained away,” he said.
When he was in New Orleans, he connected with Father Jerome LeDoux. The legendary priest had a doctorate in canon law and was fluent in Latin. More importantly, he was known for his humility, of serving the people the same way Jesus Christ walked among the sick, the homeless, the poor.
“Nothing is coincidental,” Brody said. “I've met a lot of people, especially people with whom I've connected with very, very deeply, and who have only been in my life for a very short time.”
Father Jerome LeDoux helped him at a critical point in his life. At the time, Brody was struggling with a lot of things. “We stayed up until the wee hours of the morning, talking about all sorts of issues. He helped me more than he could realize.”
Today Brody Hale is not only without sight, he has hearing loss as well. When he was twenty-six, he was told that his hearing was worse than that of an eighty-year-old. His hearing loss is related to another genetic syndrome that has not yet been diagnosed. “I haven’t been able to hear the birds sing since I was in high school,” he said
Yet, he is an active listener, focusing on the exact words that someone is saying. He doesn’t get sarcasm, but does have a grasp on the tone of voice; he takes what people say to be quite literal, and relies how the person who is speaking is putting together sentences.
Sacred Edifices
Brody Hale asserts that we are not supposed to lose churches. If we truly understand the faith, churches are set apart from the secular world as sacred edifices, specifically intended for Catholic worship. Before 1983, when the code of canon law was changed to make it easier to close them, a church could not be permanently closed unless it was destroyed. Closing a church was never supposed to be part of the Roman Catholic Church Doctrine.
As a kid, he knew that Saint Francis of Assisi Church was important to his mom and he felt special going there. As he grew older he understood that the church was important on a much deeper level. “Our ancestors donated their blood, sweat and tears to build these places,” he said. He realized that if Catholics believe what their faith teaches them about churches, it is horrifying to see the gravity of the injustice and the pain when churches are closed.
Saving Catholic Churches from Death and Destruction
Lately he’s focused on practicing law, specifically saving Catholic Churches in danger of being shut. The work is intense and demanding. According to canon law, sacred spaces are not supposed to be profaned, but many of today’s church leaders are hypocritical and claim these churches are just buildings. There are many archdioceses in the U.S. that have been selling off properties to help defray the expenses incurred in sexual abuse cases. The business dealings of bishops are purely transactional. They treat Catholic parishes and churches like poker chips in Las Vegas—assets they can cash in to use for whatever purpose they want.
Case at point, there is evidence that the Archdiocese of New York sells properties for massive amounts of money and skims the money right off the top. When two parishes are merged, the new parish entity is supposed to receive the money from the proceeds of a sale.
For example St. Mary, (Immaculate Conception) in Yonkers, New York, is a vibrant, fiscally sound parish that has already absorbed parishioners from the closure of Our Lady of the Rosary in 2007, another parish whose parishioners were largely Hispanic. After closing the parish, the Archdiocese of New York sold the church building for $5.3 million.
According to canon law, the proceeds from the sale of Our Lady of the Rosary should have gone to St. Mary (Immaculate Conception), and instead were absorbed by the Archdiocese of New York. The Archdiocese doesn’t have a canonical right to the money, but they took it anyway. They believes they can do whatever they want, and they are too big to be questioned.
Brody Hale has worked to save churches for twenty years. He has seen the damage done to Catholics when their church is lost. He feels the pain and hurt that parishioners experience when they lose their church. He has seen grown men crying when their church is all they have left. The suffering has taken its toll.
He knows these people are being exploited. He knows what their ancestors have toiled to achieve is being taken away…by bullies, and he doesn’t appreciate bullies, even if they wear a liturgical headdress (mitre) and carry a pastoral staff (crozier). “I do fight,” Brody said, “and I fight hard.”
He is actively working on saving dozens of churches across the United States. Most of his cases come to him by referral. While he’s licensed to practice law in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Illinois, the process of saving a church is out of the bounds of state law. Saving a Catholic Church is where all roads ultimately lead to Rome.
When an archdiocese closes a parish or merges one parish with another, an appeal can be filed, but most parishioners do not know how to do it. This is where Brody comes in. It is unlikely an archdiocese will reverse a decision to close or merge a parish. The next step is to file an appeal, a Petition for Hierarchical Recourse Against The Elimination of the Parish with the Dicastery for the Clergy in the Vatican.
Brody Hale’s proficiency in canon law has given him the ability to save sacred spaces. He believes he can even the playing field that is heavily gamed in favor of bishops who are far removed from the people whom they serve.
He recently scored a major victory with St. Joseph Parish in Joliet, Illinois. St. Joseph is a “personal parish” that serves Slovenian Catholics. The parish has a large number of parishioners and is thriving financially. The church existed within the boundaries of a territorial parish, Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Bishop Ronald Aldon Hicks of the Diocese of Joliet in Illinois attempted to merge St. Joseph with three other parishes, not including Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Bishop Hicks denied the appeal filed by St. Joseph’s parishioners.
In canon law, you need a just cause to close a parish and you need a grave cause to close a church permanently. The case of St. Joseph had neither. It was also out of the bounds of canon law to merge a personal parish with a territorial parish if the church will remain out of the boundaries of the territorial parish—that’s where Bishop Hicks made a mistake. Brody wrote the appeal, which went to Rome. The strength of the parish was duly noted and resulted in a smashing victory for the parishioners. The decision from the Vatican was so strongly worded that Bishop Hicks didn’t have a strong case for overturning the decision in an appeal process.
In Brody’s estimation, in the future, the Vatican will take a closer look at parish closures to discern the true motives of a presiding bishop.
On Faith
Today the church that Brody Hale prefers is the Church of the Holy Innocents, located at 128 West 37th Street at Broadway in Manhattan. The church offers four daily masses, one in Latin (the Tridentine Latin Rite). He believes the Latin Mass is a greater vehicle through which faith can be transmitted based on the way the liturgical rights are structured.
Within the context of the Realpolitik of today, Brody asserts that we’re starting to lose a grasp on what is truly real in society—and that is very scary. He is well versed in other Christian faiths inasmuch as he has a profound understanding of non-Christian philosophy. He could wax on indefinitely about Rousseau. He has not immersed himself in Islam or Buddhist tracts, and yet he has an deep abiding respect for Tanzila 'Taz' Ahmed, a Muslim activist, storyteller, poet and podcaster based in Los Angeles. Her work has led him to think more deeply about how he lives his own life. “I respect anyone who is trying to get to the truth,” he said.
Walking the Talk
There are others who walk the talk embodying the objective truth of the Catholic faith. Dorothy Day comes to mind. Her work to help the poor, and to educate the world about social injustices, resulted in the founding of shelters throughout the United States as well as significant social reform. Sister Helen Prejean CSJ is a leading advocate for the abolition of the death penalty in the United States. She is known for her book “Dead Man Walking.” Sister Prejean served as spiritual advisor to two convicts on death row up until the time they were executed. Prejean said, “I'm just trying to follow the example of Jesus, who said, ‘that a person is not as bad as his worst deed.’”
Christ’s two commandments—to forgive one another as he has forgiven us, and to love one another as you love yourself, might see seem simple, but they’re not. Forgiveness and loving others as ourselves might be the two hardest things in the world to do. Brody thinks all Catholics have to embrace these commandments. If they did embrace them, we would have a better world. He said, “I believe forgiveness and love are the ultimate things we have to do in life.”
Catholicity. The true essence means universality, completeness, wholeness, and within this wholeness, there is infinite grace. “I've never been worried about the approval of others,” Brody said. “I don't know if it's because I couldn't see the faces of other people and their disapproval of me. I don't exactly love walking a path on my own. But I've always beaten my own drum to some degree, for better or for worse.”
He remembers losing his childhood church, St. Francis of Assisi, as surely as if it had happened yesterday. In September 2006, when the church closed, people took over and prevented the doors from being locked. He remembers calling his grandfather who had fallen away from the faith when his wife died in 1967. His grandfather grew up in a house almost directly across the street from the church and had been an altar boy there in the 1930s. He fought in Iwa Jima during World War II. His nine children had been baptized in that church. It was part of his life, his parents’ lives, and his grandparents’ lives, too. After his first wife passed away, he had moved to Kansas.
One day Brody called his grandfather who was dying from cancer. He told his grandfather he was doing everything he could to save the church. It was the last lucid conversation that he had with him. Losing that church was a real blow to his heart. “You really never get over losing a church. It’s a type of pain that is excruciating, deep, and basically lasts a lifetime. I swore if I could not save my own, I would make sure that other people would not go through that.”
LINKS:
https://brodyhalelaw.com/
St. Joseph's Parish Prevails, Bishop Hicks Won't Appeal His Defeat
https://patch.com/illinois/joliet/st-josephs-parish-prevails-bishop-hicks-wont-appeal-his-defeat
Patricia Vaccarino
Patricia Vaccarino is an accomplished writer who has written award-winning film scripts, press materials, articles, essays, speeches, web content, marketing collateral, and ten books.