Friday, June 28, 2024
That Terrible Debate
Saturday, June 22, 2024
Together in the Same Boat with Jesus
Church law requires those charged with the responsibility of leadership in religious communities at stated times to visit their members and those entrusted to their care. This is an ancient prescription in the life of the Church that dates way back to a time when personal visits were very time-consuming and otherwise difficult and challenging, but they were nonetheless seen as necessary and desirable for communication and community. Nowadays, we communicate much more frequently and in many varied ways. Even so, direct personal face-to-face interaction retains a certain privileged status. Indeed, as you are undoubtedly aware, there is a lot of concern in our society today about the breakdown and failure of interpersonal interactions, thanks to the dominance of technological alternatives. However modern we may be or want to be, nothing quite can replace personal presence in human relations.
And so it was also in today's Gospel passage [Mark 4:35-41] about the disciples in the boat on the Sea of Galilee caught in a violent, frightening storm. Not surprisingly, the disciples were filled with fear and terror amid the raging tempest, and they equally unsurprisingly turned to Jesus for help in their panic, – much as many people turn to him in prayer even now, if only as a last resort because nothing else seems to work.
Jesus, of course, was there. He was present. His presence, however, was obscured by the fact that he was asleep. Hence the disciples’ frantic efforts to awake him, which they eventually succeed in doing, with the intended result.
This image of the disciples in the boat caught in a life-threatening storm is a traditional image used to depict the Church, which has been sailing through the centuries through some seriously stormy times. We might include in that familiar image our own era, with its conflicts and divisions that seem to be tearing our society apart, conflicts and divisions form which the Church itself is not immune.
This Gospel story reminds us that Christ continues present in his Church now as then, whether the threatening storms be external challenges, inner turmoil, or our inevitable uncertainty about the future. The same story challenges us, however, that his presence is not some theoretical abstraction. Rather, we must really recognize his presence among us and take his presence seriously enough to call on him.
Storms are inevitable. The boat – our Church, our society, our local community – will always have to struggle, a struggle we can’t escape. So inevitably, we may feel fear and anxiety, even doubt, as we face difficulties. The Gospel challenges us to face those difficulties together, as a community conscious of Christ’s continuing presence among us, a presence that reveals itself in many ways, not least in the faith, hope, and love we share with one another, together int he same boat with Jesus.
Homily for the 12th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, Horseshoe Bay, TX, June 23, 2024.
Monday, June 17, 2024
Our Hollowed-Out Political Parties
Saturday, June 15, 2024
1968 Again
Everyone remembers Charles Dickens' famous description of the extreme contradictions at the heart of a revolutionary time: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
By common agreement, 1968 was such a year. For me, all of 20 years old at the time, liberated from the Bronx to live in Manhattan and a student at City College, it was, all things considered, a good year - in many ways for me, "the best of times." For America at large, however, it has to be remembered as one for the most cataclysmic years in American history and, without overstatement, in many ways "the worst of times." How like - or unlike - the present (to follow through with the Dickens' analogy) may well be debated. But certainly there is a lot about our apocalyptic-seeming present that invites comparison with that tumultuous time. So, I have been rereading one of the best books about 1968, An American Melodrama: The Presidential Campaign of 1968 (NY: Viking, 1969) by British journalists Lewis Chester, Godfrey Hodgson, and Bruce Page.
To anyone who was alive and politically conscious back then, the story is a familiar one. Perhaps because these authors were British, they brought to its telling a particular sense of perspective that makes their account come alive even today, when the reader obviously brings to the story not only one's multitude of personal and political memories from then but also an awareness of everything that has happened since.
Their story, the fury-filled tale of 1968, revolved around the two crises that defined that year, that in important respects have continued to define American society and politics ever since - Vietnam and race. Although it was Vietnam that produced the insurgent candidacies of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy and brought an early end to the presidency of Lyndon Johnson (who only four years earlier had been elected in the greatest of landslides), and it was Vietnam which led inexorably to the riots at the Chicago convention and still haunts U.S. foreign policy daces later, race remained always our unhappy inheritance which divides us still as assuredly as it divided the country then. (I remember at the time writing an essay in my "Political Science 1" class highlighting race - rather than Vietnam - as the great issue unsettling American politics.)
Some of the authors' observations seem in retrospect even more prescient and worth recalling. Thus, they noted that the presidential primary system "for all its absurdities, does offer an opportunity for an insurgent candidate, with comparatively little money, to get into contention." While the authors rightly recognized 1968 as a triumph of regular over new politics, it did foreshadow (and help make inevitable) the triumph of our outsider-politics primary system over the regular politics reflected in the traditional party conventions. We also get yet another lesson in the terminal impotency of third-party type movements, the electoral mischief facilitated by the defects of the U.S. constitution, and how the personal and/or ideological intransigence of a certain segment of Democrats helped guarantee Nixon's elections - as it has continued to help Republicans repeatedly since then. Indeed, the authors bring to their coverage of the 1968 election a superb grasp of some of the enduring features of how American politics works. Thus, regarding campaigns, "the main thrust of the enterprise must be to rally support, working within a framework of definitions made earlier - more or less hazily. Resolution of questions must take second place to the consolidation of coalitions."
They also noted how "it was the men who were eliminated, not the men who were nominated, who told the American people frankly where they stood on the war, race, poverty, and crime." In a way barely perceptible amid the apparently revolutionary chaos of the time, the Nixon interlude that followed from 1968 served as precisely that - an interlude, while the racial resentments and related, realigning forces then transforming the Republican party gained strength triumphing finally in the era of Trump.
Considering the great insurgent candidates of 1968, one is struck by the authors' insight how RFK's support came from both those who supported LBJ's war policy and those who opposed it and how "the middle-class liberals who were turning away from Kennedy were turning away from the man who above all others could moderate the hostility between black and white which threatened the Democratic Party at is base in 1968." The authors did not doubt that Kennedy "looked more capable than anyone else of beginning the great task of reconciliation between black and white." Their coverage of Kennedy's unique connection with Mexican-Americans was also particularly insightful. To side with the grape pickers, they wrote, "does not require a radical or complex political philosophy. It requires compassion, some measure of courage, and a relish for direct action and plain loyalties." Their treatment of the Kennedy candidacy also occasioned a welcome refresher course in Weber's theories about charismatic (as opposed to traditional and bureaucratic) authority, which have acquired a renewed salience a century after Weber.
But it is perhaps the authors' perceptive analysis of the (now so little remembered) George Wallace candidacy that may be most prescient about where politics would be going in the decades after 1968. They note the importance of the massive population shifts which meant that by 1968 more than half the African-American population lived outside the South and Wallace's appreciation of how Northerners would react to the presence of large numbers of African-Americans "in their midst by adopting traditional Southern racial attitudes." George Wallace "had found a set of rhetorical keys which would open many political boxes in 1968" - and ever since. For the 1968 story of the final unraveling of the South's stranglehold over the Democratic party also presaged the coming stranglehold of the South over the Republican party.
As we anticipate another Chicago convention, their coverage of that great disaster of 1968 alone makes the book worth reading, along with their insight about the expressive politics that permeated the atmosphere that year: "when the might of a society cannot be challenged, strike at its myths."
Another thing we can even one safely anticipate is another close election - a consequence in part of the polarizing politics of subtraction. Close elections were less the norm then, but that reality was already evident in 1968. Nixon "had calculated that he could be elected without significant help from the poor, the foreign, the black, the angry or the troubled, and he had been right. But it has been a desperately close thing."
Friday, June 7, 2024
Love to the End
In his book, Mercy: The Essence of the Gospel and the Key to Christian Life, Walter Cardinal Kasper, considered the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which the Church celebrates today. "In many centuries," Kasper wrote, "veneration of the sacred heart of Jesus functioned as a special expression of faith in God's love and mercy." In Jesus' heart, "we recognize that God himself has a heart for us, who are poor, in the broadest sense of the word, and that he is, therefore, merciful. In this way, the heart of Jesus is an emblem of God's love, which became incarnate in Jesus Christ."
Historically, the devotion to the Sacred Heart has been strongly associated with the Jesuits, who have promoted it vigorously over the centuries.
John’s Gospel’s account of the death of Jesus on the Cross highlights the blood and water which flowed from the dead Christ’s side, traditionally seen as a symbolic birth of the Church through the sacraments of baptism and eucharist. Thus, according to the 13th-century Franciscan, Saint Bonaventure, Jesus’ side was pierced so that the Church might be formed from his side as he slept on the Cross, and, when the blood and water gushed forth, the price of our salvation might be poured out as if issuing from the hidden fountain of his Heart and might give power to the sacraments of the Church to bestow the life of grace. In the same place, Saint Bonaventure addressed Christ in these words: “to this end was your side pierced, that an entry might be open to us. To this end was your heart wounded, that in it we might be able to dwell secure from alarms from without.”
The recognition of the love of God for us expressed in the heart of his Son took on a special importance in a period in the Church’s history when devotion seemed to have cooled and God’s love had become an abstraction. Now again, on this annual solemnity of the Sacred Heart, this message of God’s overwhelming love and mercy may be important to recall now and to meditate upon on now in this cold-hearted and troubled time.
Homily for the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, June 7, 2024.
Photo: Altar of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, on wich are inscribed the words Dilexit nos in finem ("He loved us to the end"). Above the German-carved statue of Jesus inviting all to take refuge in his Sacred Heart is a painting of the Blessed Sacrament in a Monstrance, adored by Angels, with above it the Holy Spirit portrayed as a Dove.
Thursday, June 6, 2024
D Day + 80
Today is the 80th anniversary of World War II's D-Day, the long-delayed, much anticipated, cross-channel, Allied invasion of German-occupied Europe. The amphibious landing of American, British, Canadian, and other forces in Normandy that day was a logistical accomplishment of monumental proportions, with military and political consequences of comparably monumental significance.
So today U.S. President Joe Biden, Britain's King Charles III and Queen Camilla, French President Emmanuel Macron, and other international leaders are joining many others in Normandy to commemorate what wartime President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his famous D-Day Prayer, called "a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity." Fittingly, in addition to the secular ceremonies, the Catholic Diocese of Bayeux-Lisieux is celebrating several D-Day Anniversary Masses on the Normandy beaches themselves and at Bayeux Cathedral. (The cathedral has also hosted a D-Day-eve ecumenical service, attended by Britain's Princess Royal.)
These anniversary celebrations are rendered somewhat bittersweet by the realization that the "Greatest Generation," that fought and won that war, has largely passed from the scene. My own father, who landed in France on D+2 (June 8, 1944) and who left me a map (photo) of his service in Europe between then and V-E Day (May 8, 1945), died in 1999, just a few months shy of what would have been his 80th birthday. All my uncles who had fought in that war and almost everyone else I grew up knowing from that generation has gone. We inhabit a world bereft of heroes.
Tellingly, the U.S. Congress has been emptied of World War II veterans for a decade now. There was a time when Congress was full of them. The House reached its peak of WWII veterans in 1969, when there were 327 of them in the House. The Senate's veterans membership peaked at 81 in 1975. (Also six of the eight presidents who served from 1973 to 1993 - Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Bush - were WWII veterans.) It was no accident that the most productive Congresses in modern U.S. history were when the "Greatest Generation" dominated. The power of that shared wartime experience united politicians of widely different backgrounds and beliefs, and their experience wining that war had taught them both what governmental power could accomplish and the importance of American engagement with the wider world. The loss of that shared worldview, of that generation's patriotism, and of their willingness to work together despite different backgrounds and beliefs has greatly diminished not just Congress but America.
Not so long ago, this anniversary also served as a celebration of what the Second World War accomplished and the new - largely democratic and increasingly prosperous - political and social order established in the Western part of the post-war world. But that world and that post-war political and social order have been shattered in part by globalization and the perhaps inevitable changes in the worldwide balance of power and in part by the very non-inevitable U.S Trump-MAGA withdrawal from world leadership. May today be a wholesome reminder of the importance of American leadership in the world and a warning of what happened a century ago when American had withdrawn from and shunned such leadership.
Photo: Map drawn by my father to commemorate his service in Europe, from his landing two days after D-Day until V-E Day, May 8, 1845.
Wednesday, June 5, 2024
After the Verdict
The Wall Street Journal Review Section (June 1, 2024, C3) said it simply and straightforwardly: "Trump was convicted by a Jury, not by his political enemies." It was, the WSJ observed, "12 ordinary citizens, not Biden, Soros or Merchan, who unanimously pronounced Trump guilty on 34 felony counts. In fact, the Trump trial shows why juries have long been considered an important anti-corruption device." Ultimately, of course, the voters will reaffirm or nullify the jury's verdict in November, but, as the WSJ said," we should give some thought - and many thanks - to he 12 citizens who served on the jury. ... Somewhere the Founders are smiling, even if Donald Trump is scowling."
Not just Trump, but all of MAGA world is scowling - and, more than scowling, attacking the judicial system itself. Nothing is surprising anymore! In this era of low trust in institutions , popular trust in the bedrock democratic republican institutions of an independent judiciary and trial-by-jury may be another casualty, with consequences increasingly catastrophic to contemplate.
Of course, there have always been some legitimate legal concerns about this case. There remains the real possibility that legal issues may result in its being reversed on appeal, the consequences of which can only be guessed at. There is also the argument to which I have been totally unsympathetic, reflected in Jonathan Chait's comment that the case may be "too marginal a violation to be balanced against the social and political costs it raises" ("Trump's Conviction: the Case for Misgivings," New York, June 3, 2024). Even so, such reservations if any "are political, not legal."
Because, whatever happens on appeal, the jury has determined the facts of the case and has found Trump to be guilty on the facts. In MAGA world, however, this uncomfortable new information can only be evaluated in a way that aligns with the already established party line. In the rest of the world, however, Trump's conviction confirms criminal behavior on the part of someone with a familiar pattern of disrespect for law and disregard for the norms long expected of participants in our civic life.
His supporters' over-the-top reactions only serve to highlight the danger and menace the MAGA movement may portend for our country's future.
Tuesday, June 4, 2024
Founding Partisans
Sunday, June 2, 2024
Corpus Christi
As most people know (or ought to know) the Catholic Church in the U.S. is in the midst of a “Eucharistic Revival,” which will culminate in July at a National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis. (The last one was on Philadelphia in 1976.) A little over a week ago, one of the Eucharistic Processions en route to Indianapolis passed through New York, stopping in Westchester, the Bronx, Manhattan, and Brooklyn, with Benediction celebrated at such unaccustomed sites as the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty. This National Eucharistic Revival is a contemporary response on the part of the U.S. Church to the challenge to be united around the source and summit of our faith in the Eucharistic celebration.
More than a decade ago, I led a group of midtown-Manhattan parishioners in a series of dialogues with representatives from a local synagogue. We met every month or so for about a year, and we had some very good discussions with good participation from both congregations (although sometimes our discussions devolved into dialogues between myself and the Rabbi about arcane subjects, which at least the two of us found very interesting).
One such topic was sacrifice. It is widely believed that some form of sacrifice has characterized almost all religions. The word itself, “sacrifice,” means “to make sacred.” Historically it refers to the offering of valuable objects – of food, for example, the bread and wine offered by Melchizedek (Genesis 14:18), of incense, of animals, and even of humans - all offered as an act of worship of God and in hope of communing with God. The Old Testament recounts the offerings of Cain and Abel at the beginning of human history (Genesis 4:3-4) and the sacrifice of Noah after the Flood (Genesis 8:20), but perhaps the most famous Old Testament sacrifice was Abraham’s offering of his son Isaac - thankfully replaced by a ram - on Mount Moriah, the future site of the Temple in Jerusalem (Genesis 22:13).
Sacrifice was at the heart of what went on in that Temple, where sacrifices were offered at set times every day (including, in Jesus’ time, two lambs offered daily for the Roman Emperor). By then, the Temple in Jerusalem had acquired a monopoly on Jewish sacrifices. That meant, however, that, when the Temple was destroyed in 70 A.D., Judaism suddenly became a religion with no place to offer sacrifice. The Judaism of most of the past 2000 years, therefore, has been that of the synagogue (not the Temple), of rabbis (rather than priests), of a rich tradition of individual and communal prayer at set times developed to take the place of the prescribed sacrifices. What intrigued us in our local Catholic-Jewish dialogue, however, was how, historically, just when sacrifice was about to disappear from Judaism, Christianity continued the concept, preserving the religious importance of sacrifice in our experience of the Eucharist.
On this Solemnity of the Body and Blood of the Lord (commonly called Corpus Christi) today’s first reading at Mass (Exodus 24:3-8) recalls the role of sacrifice in sealing the covenant between God and his people at Mount Sinai. Although there were many types of sacrifices – grain and incense, for example – which involved no blood, often blood was central to the sacrifice. In ancient Rome, for example, worshipers of the god Mithra would lie in a trench and let the warm blood of a just slaughtered steer flow over them. Likewise, after sacrificing holocausts and peace offerings to the Lord, Moses took the blood and sprinkled it on the people, saying. “This is the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words of his.”
The New Testament portrays Jesus’ life and death as an offering of his entire self, making fully and permanently effective God’s personal alliance with us. So, today’s Corpus Christi Gospel (Mark 14:12-16, 22-26) remembers Jesus, on the eve of the annual Passover sacrifice, referring to the blood of the covenant – recalling Moses’ earlier sacrifice, but referring in fact to his own blood. This blood, it turns out, substitutes for the blood of goats and calves to seal what the letter to the Hebrews clearly calls a new covenant. Calling the Risen Christ high priest of the good things that have come to be, the letter to the Hebrews clearly wants us to understand Christ’s accomplishment as a sacrifice. Whereas all the sacrifices of the past served certain specific and limited purposes, that of Christ the High Priest, was a once-and-for-all offering of Christ’s own self, unblemished to God through the eternal Spirit, in order to cleanse our consciences to worship the living God (Hebrews 9:11-15).
The same letter to the Hebrews elsewhere tells us that the Risen Christ is always able to save those who approach God through him, since he lives forever to make intercession for them (Hebrews 7:25). As priest, Christ continually offers worship before the Father on our behalf. As sacrifice, Christ becomes our worship, as he unites us with him in his body by means of his blood.
And so, in anticipation of shedding his blood on our behalf, Jesus shared his body and blood with his disciples in the form of bread and wine. He turned an otherwise ordinary meal into a sacrificial sign of the new relationship uniting us with him in his body, the Church, by means of his blood. This same sacrificial meal Jesus has commanded his priests to repeat in his memory in the Eucharistic meal, the sacrifice of the Mass.
And so it is that, for us Christians, sacrifice continues uniquely in Christ’s once-and-for-all sacrificial gift of himself to his Father, made permanently present for us in the Eucharist. In the Eucharist, the sacrifice of Christ becomes the offering of his body and blood through his body, the Church. This sacrifice unites all Christians of all times and places in Christ’s one offering of himself, now present for us on our altar, uniting us not only with Christ but through him with one another, with all who eat and drink at his altar and who share this new life of gratitude and hope.
Established by Pope Urban IV in 1264, today’s festival of Corpus Christi highlights the permanent presence of the Risen Christ in the Eucharistic sacrifice. According to legend, the Dominican Friar Saint Thomas Aquinas and the Franciscan Friar Saint Bonaventure both began composing texts for the new feast. But, when Saint Bonaventure visited Saint Thomas, he read the antiphon Thomas had composed for today’s Evening Prayer. When he got home, Bonaventure threw his own manuscript into the fire. Thus, it is the familiar words of Saint Thomas that summarize what we celebrate today – and every day – in the Eucharistic sacrifice: “O Sacred Banquet, in which Christ is consumed, the memory of His Passion is renewed, the soul is filled with grace and a pledge of future glory is given us.”