The Perils of "Post-Liberalism"

When asked in the past, I have most frequently associated myself with Daniel Bell who famously described himself as "a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture." More recently, undoubtedly influenced by the perilous direction of current events, I have have probably become maybe moderately more "socialist in economics," moderately more "liberal in politics," and moderately more confused about culture - probably a little less "conservative" on particular cultural issues, while still responding nostalgically to the fundamental "conservative" critique of the corrosive character of modern culture. Thus, of all the factions that make up the intellectual New Right - so well described  by Laura K. Field in her recent Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right (Princeton University Press, 2005), about which I posted last week - the only one which at all resonates with me morally, culturally, and intellectually is "post-liberalism," whose "aestheric" Field characterizes as "sober, traditionalist, and highbrow."

The academic most associated with "post-liberalism" is Patrick Deneen, one time student of Wilson Carey McWilliams, currently professor of political science at Notre Dame, author of Why Liberalism Failed (2018) and Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (2023). That later book suggests some sort of post-liberal conservatism that focuses on the "common good" as liberalism's replacement. Steeped inthe Catholic philosophical tradition, I find the language of "common good" attractive, but less o its advocates and what they appear to propose.

In 2018, former President Barack Obama recommended Why Liberalism Failed as part of his summer reading list. Obama wrote that he found Deneen's book "thought-provoking. I don’t agree with most of the author’s conclusions, but the book offers cogent insights into the loss of meaning and community that many in the West feel, issues that liberal democracies ignore at their own peril." Even as what was not so long ago a "conservative" critique of modernity's failings has increasingly degenerated into an apologia for cruel authoritarianism, that critique remains relevant. Any serious attempt to get beyond the present political impasse needs to grapple with secular modernity's colossal failure, which Obama rightly described as a felt "loss of meaning and community."

In a somewhat similar vein, Field characterizes Deneen as "the most palatable, sanitized version of Trumpy populism that one is likely to encounter. His writing combines a stern social conservatism and republicanism with strident anti-liberalism and anti-elitism. It is likely to be alienating to economic liberals (so to both neoliberals and neoconservatives) but appealing to anyone who cares about culture and community, or about the environment, or who has suffered the vicissitudes of late modern capitalism in their own lives."

Deneen's critique comes out of a Catholic conservative tradition, which has long harbored reservations about liberalism's individualistic premises and the amoral and ultimately nihilistic directions in which it has steadily been leading society. But Deneen developed his argument to a cynical extreme. As Field notes Deneen effectively "accused liberals of being without genuine affection, feeling, or meaning in their own lives." She cites Ezra Klein's response to this kind of caricature during his own interview with Deneen, "Everybody I know is tangled up in complex family, loving, critical, difficult, beautiful family relationships." 

There is, of course, probably some degree of truth in both positions. Liberalism does undermine all not-autonomously assumed obligations, and so at some level is profoundly damaging to all traditional ties, including those of family. And anyone who doubts that should just read contemporary ethical advice columns, which often presume the primacy of the individual and celebrate liberation from traditional ties, even family. On the other hand, people are complicated. Without condoning late-life marital separations, for example, society needs to recognize and grapple with the new relational challenges posed by longer life-spans. That aid, te human craving for relationship and call to community are powerful natural forces which still survive even despite an officially professed individualistic liberatory ideology. Those same ethical advice columns that may undermine traditional relationships and strong community bonds also testify to the perennial persistence of such relational anc communal needs.

The problem with "post-liberalism" is not that it fails to diagnose what we have lost, but that it offers no plausible path to something better. In 2018, Deneen echoed Rod Dreher's 2017 Benedict Option in advocating local community building efforts, which do have a certain real merit (especially, I would suggest, when religiously motivated). But that can only go so far. Most people cannot (let lone will not choose to) go off the grid into pseudo-utopian sectarianism. Short of that, even a religiously motivated life must continue to be lived in late-capitalist, consumerist, relationship-impaired modernity. More basically, it must also be lived amidst disagreement on even the most fundamental matters, the perennial problem of politics.

Of course, it is still possible to imagine solutions to at least some of our problems. "Democratic Socialism," while sharing many of modern liberalism's liberatory impulses and hence its corrosive approach to community, can offer real, more genuinely just alternatives to our presently established regime of extreme oligarchy., which liberalilsm has failed to protect people from.  For its part, "Post-liberalism" can clealry diagnose, for example, the failed economic policies which have produced our astronomical degree of inequality. But it cannot overcome the straightjacket of contemporary political divisions, which limit the set of acceptable solutions and confine political actors within polarized tribal limits which inhibit crossing the barriers necessary to experiment with diverse solutions, regardless of their ideological origins.

Catholic convert Sohrab Ahmari, founder of Compact Magazine, recognized as much when he wrote in Newsweek in 2023, that Trumpy populism could not succeed in helping working people to "attain lives of security and dignity," because he realized that "the Republican party remains incorrigibly a vehicle for the wealthy."

Thus, the alliances that "post-liberalism" is inevitably attracted to are - as inevitably - a dead-end. They seem likely further to foster the intolerance, lawlessness, and cruelty that liberalism initially sought to ameliorate. The price paid by society for liberalism's moral relativism and nihilism has been high, but the post-liberal nostalgia for a less free, less mobile, more closed community also exacts a price, and we are seeing all around us how dangerously high that price can also be.

Advent

As it was in the days of Noah,
so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.
In those days before the flood,
they were eating and drinking,
marrying and giving in marriage,
up to the day that Noah entered the ark.
They did not know until the flood came and carried them all away.
So will it be also at the coming of the Son of Man.

(Matthew 24, from the Gospel for this First Sunday of Advent)

Last month, I watched the new Netflix movie, A House of Dynamite. All of the principal characters in the film's three sequences have private lives. They are married with children (or are planning to get married), when suddenly and unexpectedly a missile appears out of the Pacific with Chicago as its target. It reminded me of how, back when I was a kid in the deep freeze of the Cold War, we regularly participated in "civil defense" drills, hiding under our desks during an imaginary nuclear attack, Yet, in between such moments of intensely focused apocalyptic expectation, we went about our ordinary lives and planned our futures, as if we fully expected the world to have a future. As it was in the days of Noah.

Sadly some recent iterations of apocalyptic seem to have an even darker dimension, as (at least according to some worried reports) some of the more contemporary generation appear to be foregoing marriage and family formation, claiming climate change and other contemporary calamities as their excuse. The calamities are legitimste, but not the excuse. Somehow some seem to have forgotten the basic imperative to keep the human story going- despite our fears and worries - as it was in the days of Noah.

All of which suggests that the Church's annual Advent message may be increasingly timely. Ostensibly the most future-oriented of seasons, Advent is in fact really a sort of stand-in for the entire Christian life, lived (as it inevitably must be) in the present - between the first coming of Christ and his hoped-for final advent. As Christians, we live our lives literally in this interval between Christmas and the end, which is what Advent is ultimately all about. We live in intensely focused apocalyptic expectation, while simultaneously preoccupied with our ordinary daily lives and planning our this-worldly futures - as it was in the days of Noah.

Indeed, as we pray every day at Mass, we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ. The point, however, is not when Jesus will come (an obsessive preoccupation found far too frequently in sectarian American Apocalyptic) but being ready for his coming – not as something to be put off to some far-off future, but as our present preoccupation. The future will indeed come – at its own time and on its own terms – but our task is the present, which is what, in fact, will determine who we will be in the future.

Obviously Advent, especially the way we celebrate it in the Church today, relies a lot on the seasonal imagery of darkness and light that defines this time of year in our northern hemisphere. Folkloric customs like Advent wreaths with their evergreens and candles all attempt to employ that natural seasonal imagery. Symbolic beings that we are, we readily respond to such signals. But we must be careful. Advent uses seasonal symbolism to make a point, but Advent is more than some sort of seasonal pageant. The Christian life is not a season, nor is it a play. The world really was in darkness before Christ – the darkness of alienation from God. and, inasmuch as so much of the world still suffers that same alienation, the darkness persists, coexisting with the light coming from Christ. But, unlike natural darkness, our world’s persistent alienation from God is not some abstract natural force.

We are the ones who have contributed – and continue to contribute - to this world’s darkness. For this reason, Advent was long rightly regarded as a penitential season. Pope Innocent III even prescribed black as the liturgical color for Advent - although violet eventually beat black to become the season’s official color. Conveniently, one and the same color can simultaneously symbolize both the purple of royalty (Christ the King coming in glory) and the violet of repentance.

The penance appropriate to Advent is, of course, what Paul commanded the Christians of Rome - to throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light (Romans 13). So, we all need to ask ourselves, exactly what is it that keeps us in so much darkness? Why isn’t the light of Christ shining forth from us and through us to light up our communities, our country, our world? Paul’s words challenge us to be attentive to what is happening right now. Living as we do in a culture of institutionalized irresponsibility, Advent’s message is a radical wake-up call to mean what we say - really to throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.

Our traditional account of Christ's coming into the world sets his birth during the night, the light of Christ coexisting with the darkness of a world of imperial decrees, forced migration, and. homelessness. At his final coming, of course, darkness will be destroyed. Meanwhile, however, here and now, in this interim time – between Christmas and the end – darkness and light continue to coexist, the darkness a constant challenge of a sinful present resisting Christ's brighter future

Of course, as even our annual rush to start celebrating Christmas earlier and earlier each year suggests, most of us aren’t very good at waiting. We want to know as much as possible in advance, so that we can rush into the future. The good news of the Gospel, however, is that it is precisely the present that matters. Jesus’ warning about those long ago days of Noah, reminds us how common, how universal, the experience of the present really is. We are - as we should be - still eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage – as it was in the days of Noah. The fact that the present time is limited (something one become if anything even more acutely aware of with each passing year) just makes it all the more precious, makes it matter that much more. 

Whatever surprises we may be hoping to find under the Christmas Tree this year, the coming of Christ is not one of them. Christ has already come. (If he hadn’t, we would have no Advent season to observe - let alone Christmas!) The question is whether his presence in our world today matters enough to make a difference in the way we live and what we care about – whether and how we are making the most of our limited but precious present time to become now what we hope to be when he comes again.

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

Now that the shutdown is done and air travel has returned to something resembling normal, I - like so many of my fellow Americans - have flown across the country to celebrate with family and friends this most American of holidays Thanksgiving Day. 

Increasingly, I hate air travel, hate traveling cross-country, and do it less and les. Last year, I was so worn out from two major official trips that I skipped Thanksgiving travel altogether. In the end, I think I regretted that and was resolved not to repeat that mistake again this year. Travel may be a pain, but it is the only way to be with what little natural family I have left, which makes it worth the effort - especially on Thanksgiving.

As a pastor, of course, I had liturgical responsibilities on Christmas, but Thanksgiving is not that kind of holiday. Despite its origins in an explicitly Protestant American sensibility (or perhaps precisely because of that), for those of us outside that historic tradition, Thanksgiving has always been a more secular celebration of family and community, especially when family was much more accessible - just over the river and through the wood. The fact that everyone celebrated it made Thanksgiving a truly national celebration. Smaller and fewer families and the contemporary fraying of our national bonds have diminished communities to the detriment even of Thanksgiving. Hence the somewhat silly annual anxiety about how to talk to people about politics at Thanksgiving. The very question (1) implies that we do not talk much to each other the rest of the year (a problem in itself), and (2) it highlights the perversely disproportionate importance of politics in our contemporary life. Why talk about politics on Thanksgiving, when we ought ideally to share so much else that we can talk about?

Long before "post-liberalism" became an academic meal ticket, the corrosive effects of liberal modernity on family, community, and country were already obvious. Inevitably, the effect would also be felt on Thanksgiving, which liberal modernity has increasingly degraded into "Black Friday Eve." Back in 1863, when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the first national Thanksgiving Day holiday, he mentioned "our national perverseness and disobedience." Try talking about that at any Thanksgiving table!

Thanksgiving Day has always been a celebration of plenty, of American abundance. But it also painfully highlights the absence thereof. One parish I know has had a 50% increase in the number of turkeys distributed to needy families in anticipation of the holiday. While such sharing is and ought to be a characteristic of Thanksgiving's observance, it also points to the deepening distress that is endemic in our society at this time, which no Thanksgiving festivities can completely cover over. This increasing inequality and the deepening distress that has accompanied it - not some real or imagined squeamishness about political polarization - is the real challenge that overshadows and darkens ourThanksgiving holiday.

Furious Minds

 

What passes for "conservatism" in the U.S. - including in its current MAGA iteration - has long been both a populist movement (often quite extreme, sometimes at the fringes of the larger movement, more recently closer to its mainstream) and a serious intellectual movement worthy of study as political theory. In Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right (Princeton University Press, 2025), sometime academic political theorist. Laaura K. Field has chronicled the intellectual antecedents and expressions of this modern political movement.

The author was herself educated in part in the intellectual traditions (notably Straussianism) which were he antecedents to today's :furious minds." This is one of the book's assets, although the book does suffer somewhat from perhaps overly frequent interjections by the author highlighting her own disagreements with these authors, disagreements which often enough reflect predictable ideological positions. On the other hand, her background may have helped her to appreciate conservative insights which mainstream liberal academia notable fails to appreciate.

As someone who was once at the margins of the political theory world (although not as a Straussian), I found the more academic parts of the book among the most interesting. In the end, If nothing else, I felt nostalgic reading about Straussians Harry Jaffa, Allan Bloom, and Harve Mansrield. That said, I am not convinced that the self-regarding MAGA intellectual elites will end up leading rather than following the MAGA populists in whatever that movement's future will be, but we have perhaps always overrated the intellectual dimension of American right-wing politics, what Field calls an "Ideas First approach."

Field divides the New Right into "the Claremonters, the Postliberalsm and the National /conservatives." The West Coast Struassian Claremonters are "youthful, bitter, masculinist, and counterrevolutionary." The Postliberals are less interested than the Claremnoters in the American founding and embrace "many elements of communitarianism and traditional Catholic social teaching, including a greater role for the state in shaping public life and morality." They are "sober, traditionalist, and highbrow." The National Conservatives are the movement's "big tent and umbrella." National Conservatism embraces an exclusive sense of American nationalism that "cuts against America's tradition of religious pluralism, as well as the Declarationist creedal elements of America's traditional understanding and civil religion." Its mood is "fervent and unyielding." Ideologically spanning these camps is what she calls the "Hard Right," which is "more hard-line, racist, misogyinistic, and violent in their rhetoric." It aesthetic is "hypermasculinist, desperate, and ruthless."

Field emphasizes how the New Right is so "untethered from the ordinary decency and commons sense that characterize America at its idealistic best - and from the pluralistic reality of the country as it exists today." She identifies a failure to reckon with basic political life "the fact that people really do think differently and disagree, about just about everything, and especially about the most important things, like the meaning of life, God, and the soul, and what is good."

To me, the most interesting thing about Field's work is that in her treatment of these dangerous ideas and directions, she also recognizes the fundamental weakness of liberalism which helped bring us to this pass. She credits the Straussian Bloom, for example, for conveying "how people in modern democracies are confused about the role that moral evaluations play in democratic life and politics. In the universities, this often means either that ethical and moral questions are avoided entirely or that the answers are presumed and righteously taken for granted."

Also of interest is the way the Postliberals appear to separate from the rest of the New Right is certain respects. The Postliberals "are more serious about moving beyond neoliberal economics in ways that would help the working class. They are also at once more skeptical of the New Right's crude nativism and. more free-thinking when it comes to international affairs. ... They are not beholden to GOP donors, or to the GOP base." As a result, "with the exception of their influence on JD Vance, they have been the least influential thinkers on the New Right." Indeed, the whole Catholic component of Postliberalism, to the extent it takes its Catholic claims seriously, serves to separate and marginalize Postliberalism. An extreme case is Sohrab Ahmari, who in 2023 finally realized that the Republicans "will never be the party of the working class" and remain "incorrigibly, a vehicle for the wealthy." 

Another important takeaway from Field's work, which is in a sense obvious at the popular level, but which deserves special mention is the intensely masculinist sensibility of so much New Right thinking. Field inverts the classical story of the Furies (who, of course, were feminine and pre-political and were displaced by a more masculine classical politics. A lot more attention probably needs to be paid to the primordial rage and anger that are revealed in the contemporary New Right - both in its intellectual as well as its populist performances.

Most important, however, is the challenge the New Right's rejection of liberalism poses for the inherent weakness of liberalism. Field notes "liberals have far too long accepted a minimalist self-understanding that avoids all talk of virtue and ethical vision; they have similarly refused to acknowledge and cultivate the moral worlds and traditions that sustain our lives."

The American Revolution Reconsidered

 

In anticipation of next year's Semiquincentennial of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, PBS last Sunday began to air the latest Ken Burns historical epic - a six-episode, twelve-hour documentary, The American Revolution. I watched the opening episode on our local PBS station and then watched the rest of the episodes on PBS Passport.

Twelve hours are a lot for a contemporary audience, with a notoriously limited attention span. That same audience may be as notoriously unfamiliar with much of American history. It will be a challenge to get those with little or no knowledge or interest in history to watch the series. Ken Burns, with his popularly oriented stye and well established reputation, may well be the one best positioned to do so.

My generation did study history in school, and it was probably my favorite subject. Even so, what we learned was limited in so many ways. For example, we learned just one thing about the Battle of Long Island, that "Washington lost." But we learned little or nothing about how that defeat fit into the overall story of the Revolution, either militarily or politically.

Ken Burns' style is noted for its inclusion of many and multiple voices. This is always a challenge, but perhaps seldom more so that with the American Revolution which involved so many different individual actors and diverse communities. There is a famous satirical comment by John Adams in a letter to Thomas Jefferson: "Franklin smote the ground and out sprang George Washington - fully grown and on his horse. Franklin then electrified him with his miraculous lightning rod and the three of them, Franklin, Washington and the horse, conducted the entire revolution all by themselves." Obviously Adams and Jefferson and most of their contemporaries knew better, but ho many of our contemporaries do?

Burns' epic sets out to correct all such oversimplifications. It starts out by setting the scene of who the British colonists were, with their relationships were with one another, with their neighbors (Native Americans among and around them, the French to the north and west, etc.), with the enslave African population, and with the Mother Country, with which most originally identified and many continued to identify with until the end. The series highlights the colonists' relationship to land a a principal source of personal freedom and the conflict that inevitably created with the Indians and with Britain, which sought to limit the colonists' westward expansion. (The Revolution was also always "a war for empire," to wrest control of the Ohio Valley that the British had tried to keep the settlers out of.) The series also corrects any romanticized misimpression that the colonists were united as Americans and highlights how the American Revolution was actually a civil war among British Americans, thousands of whom remained loyal to the Crown and fought against their fellow colonists, dividing communities and families. (50,000 Americans served in Loyalist units.)

"Our late peaceful country now became a scene fo terror and confusion," a young Virginia woman is quoted as saying. Like other great conflicts, the Revolution was about big ideas and high ideals, but it was also an arena of terrifying fratricidal violence. The series spends less time on the bewigged idea-men and more on the experiences of ordinary soldiers and civilians, for whom the war was at times a terrifyingly violent experience. 

For some the war was a straight conflict between "loyalism" and "patriotism," but for many - especially the native tribes whose ancestral lands others were fighting over and enslaved Africans, it was often a complex calculation which side to fight for (or whether to take a side at all). In fact, both Indians and slaves fought on both sides. For some, such as the slaves who fought for the British and got to resettle in Canada, being on the losing side may have been a win. For the native Indian tribes, however, the Revolution resulted only in greater loss.

Burns captures all these complexities, without sllghting the larger canvas of great power politics, which eventually turned a rebellion in North America into a major world war fought on virtually every continent. It is good to be reminded that, however important the creation of the United States turned out to be in world history, at the time there were other places and conflicts that mattered more to many of the political players. 

Despite the infamous distortion of his role in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the series shows King George III in a more balanced light, reflecting the real complexities of the British constitution an the divisions within the British political establishment as well as the corresponding divisions within colonial society. It also illuminates the gradual transformation of opinion of those who started out wanting things to go back to the way they had been before but ended up wanting to start something new.

The series recognizes the unique and probably irreplaceable role played by George Washington. At the same time, the importance of the elite propertied theoreticians of the Revolution is balanced by the military significance of a Continental Army of largely propertyless men, all of which would have enormous implications for the democratizing dimensions of the Revolution and its aftermath. 

Obviously, any investigation into the American founding will have implications for how we consider our present. The British insistence on not leaving New York until they had arranged for Loyalists to leave as well is an obvious contrast to the ignominious American retreats from Vietnam in 1975 and Afghanistan in 2021. On the other hand, the series' emphasis on the diversity of the Americans and how new immigrants were constantly being added to the emerging society is a powerful reminder that America has always been about being a port of welcome for new and diverse peoples and has been immeasurably enriched by this experience.

Finally, we are reminded how the ideas and ideals of the Revolution have taken on a life of their own, apart from the complexities and compromises of the founding era and continue to matter not just on this continent but throughout the world.

"And thus we came to Rome"

 

And thus we came to Rome [Acts 28:14].

With that simple sentence, Luke summarizes the geographical trajectory of the Book of Acts, the sequel to his Gospel, which has taken the apostolic Church from its start in Jerusalem, through its growth and spread throughout the Mediterranean world, to its logical end in the city at the center of the world, imperial Rome. That geographical trajectory mirrors and signifies Acts' spiritual trajectory - the rapid growth and expansion of the Church from a small Jewish sect to a world Church equally open to Gentiles as well as jJews. 

The martyrdom at Rome of the two principal Apostles, Peter and Paul, is celebrated annually on June 29. Today, the Church commemorates the dedication of the two great basilicas that mark the sites of the apostles’ burials, Saint Peter’s Basilica on the Vatican Hill and the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls on Ostian Way. Both basilicas were originally built by Emperor Constantine in the 4th century. The original Saint Peter’s was famously replaced with the current magnificent baroque building, dedicated on this date in 1626. Saint Paul’s Outside the Walls was rebuilt in the 19th century after its destruction by fire in 1823. The new basilica was dedicated by Blessed Pope Pius IX on December 10, 1854. But just as the two apostles’ martyrdoms are always commemorated together on same day, likewise their churches’ dedications are celebrated together on this date.

Together with the Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran, which is the Pope’s cathedral as Bishop of Rome, and the Basilica of Saint Mary Major on the Esquiline Hill, these four papal basilicas each with a Jubilee Year Holy Door, have ben welcoming pilgrims from all over the world, who have been visiting this year to receive the Jubilee indulgence during this Holy Year which will conclude this coming January 6. Likewise, as part of their Quinquennial visit ad limina, which all diocesan bishops are required to make every fifth year to report on the life of their local Churches, the bishops as "successors of the apostles" all make a visit “to the tombs of the apostles,” hence to these two basilicas.

When we celebrate these two ancient churches that take us back to ancient Rome and the apostles who first brought the faith to what was then the center of the world, we commemorate the apostolic foundations of the Church, and we celebrate our unity with one another and with the Church of the founding apostles across the borders of space and time. And we celebrate the Church's continuing mission to proclaim the good news in very part of the world.

Homily for the Anniversary of the Dedication of the Papal Basilicas of Saints Peter and Paul, at Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, November 18, 2025..

Photos: St. Peter's Basilica (top) and the Basilica of St. Paul's Outside the Walls (Bottom).

A House of Dynamite

 

A House of Dynamite is a new Netflix film, the sort of political thriller about a potential nuclear encounter, which those of a certain age might have associated with the time of the Cold War, now repurposed in this new era by director Kathryn Bigelow and written by Noah Oppenheim. The film follows different officials in their response to a nuclear missile launched by an unidentified enemy in the Pacific and aimed at Chicago.

The film depicts the same sequence of events three times from the different perspectives of Captain Olivia Walker, the oversight officer for the White House Situation Room, Jake Baerington, Deputy National Security Advisor, and lastly the President of the United States himself. If one does not know this in advance, it may seem somewhat confusing at first as the same characters seem to be rediscovering the crisis and responding to it. It wasn't until the third scenario that I clearly came to understand that the movie was doing this. In retrospect, however, it highlights the unexpected and unique characteristics of the crisis and is very effetive dramatically.

Each of the three sequences is given a distinctive title: Inclination is Flattening, Hitting a Bullet with a Bullet, and A House Filled with Dynamite. The third title, which gives the entire film its title, reflects the reaction of the President, whose final decision is not shown.

The film unfolds mainly through a video conference connecting the President himself, Situation Room, the Secretary of Defense, the Pentagon, and various on-site military commands. It highlights the complexity of the processes employed by these inter-related agencies and the effects upon the individuals involved, who are simultaneously reacting as government officials and as individuals concerned about their particular families. In the process, we get some insight into the unpredictability of complex defensive systems, which sometimes just do not work as expected.

There is no particular ongoing political crisis that precipitates situation. It starts out as an ordinary day like any other, when suddenly everything changes almost as if by accident. The characters are married with children, or are planning to get married, when suddenly and unexpectedly a missile appears out of the Pacific with Chicago as its target. It reminded me of how, back when I was a kid in the deep freeze of the Cold War, we regularly participated in drills, hiding under our desks, But in between we went about our ordinary lives and planned our futures, as if we fully expected the world to have a future.It highlights how quickly and unexpectedly a nuclear attack can occur, and how officials can be called upon to respond to circumstances they may never actually have expected to respond to, in ways they never expected to have to respond.

It is a frighteningly dramatic reminder of how precarious our world still is in the light of nuclear proliferation.

Patron of Immigrants

 

Today the Church commemorates Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850-1917), the patroness of immigrants, who, despite intense anti-Italian prejudice both inside and outside the American Catholic community, created numerous schools and other institutions to serve those struggling to find their new life in this new land. As a child, I remember regularly being brought to visit Mother Cabrini's shrine in northern Manhattan, where her body was on display under the altar. Along with the recent election of New York City's third immigrant mayor in my lifetime, her story is one more reminder that this city - as indeed this country - was built by imigrants, who continue to transform and enrich it.

Italians had been among the great wave of southern and eastern European immigrants who crossed the ocean in waves in the late 29th and early 20th centuries. Scalabrinian Archbishop Sillvano Tomasi's Piety and Power: The Role of Italian (Catholic & Protestant) Parishes in the New York Metropolitan Area 1880 - 1930 (NY: Center for Migration Studies, 1975) provided an important and particularly noteworthy historical study of Italian Catholic life in that formative period for the U.S. as a nation of immigrants, the period when my own grandparents immigrated to New York from Italy. Another important contribution to our appreciation of immigrant religiosity (in my father's childhood neighborhood, no less) was Robert Orsi's The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (Yale University Press, 1985).

Italian and other Catholic immigrants experienced the twofold push-and-pull experience of holding on for security and community to aspects of the old world (including especially their language and their religion), while at the same time adapting to this strange new country which was so seemingly hostile to them and  simultaneously so welcome and full of opportunity. Likewise within the Church itself, the famous conflicts of the late 19th century were in part a disagreement between those who remained suspicious of American culture and values and those cautiously (or sometimes less cautiously) open to those same values even at the risk of insensitivity to immigrants' old-world worries about their culture and their religion's future in America. (One thinks here of Orestes Brownson's opposition to Catholic schools being used to perpetuate aspects of old world culture which he believed could - and should - be disentangled from the necessary effort to preserve the immigrants' Catholic religion.)

Likewise, the American parochial school system, perhaps the U.S. Church's greatest institutional accomplishment, strove both to bind Catholic children to their inherited immigrant religious culture while simultaneously (and, ultimately, more successfully) turning them into good Americans well prepared to advance in the new society into which they had been born. When I was in Catholic elementary and high school in the 1950s and early 1960s, depending on the moment or the issue, one sometimes saw oneself as an inheritor of an outsider immigrant culture and at other times (and increasingly more frequently) saw oneself as part of a wider common American culture. Undoubtedly the effective end of new immigration after the 1920s and the intense common experience of World War II had helped prepare thew ay for this transition.

The centrality of the Catholic school system for earlier immigrant generations and for my post-immigration generation cannot be overestimated. However impractical and far from universal its eventual enforcement proved to be, the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884 had required the building of parochial schools in all parishes and  had mandated attendance at them. This obviously highlighted the importance of the school system within the immigrant Catholic community and that community's extensive commitment to the schools' above-mentioned double mission. Generations of immigrant and heirs of immigrants have been the great beneficiaries of that commitment.

Meanwhile, new challenges face immigrants in our society today, and once again the Church is being called upon to address those challenges. Yesterday, by an almost unanimous vote (216 in favors 5 opposed, 3 abstentions), the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Plenary Assembly issued a "Special Message" on Immigration, which highlighted the Church's pastoral ministry to and concern for immigrants and explicitly opposed "the indiscriminate deportation of people."

The full text is available at: https://www.usccb.org/news/2025/us-bishops-issue-special-message-immigration-plenary-assembly-baltimore.

Photo: Immigrants' Panel from recently installed mural, St. Patrick's Cathedral, NY.

Veterans Day

 

Today is Veterans Day. It is minimally observed in the U.S., but as Remembrance Day it still has greater salience in the U.K and the Commonwealth. For sheer ceremonial splendor, the annual observance at London's Cenotaph on the second Sunday of November is probably the most outstanding, incorporating as it does participation by the King, the royal family, present and past prime ministers and other politicians, the military, veterans, the clergy, and the public more broadly. More simply but very movingly, I remember the universal observance of the minute-of-silence. along with the universal wearing of poppies, when I served in a parish in Canada in the late 1990s. It hardly speaks well for the U.S. that this day can pass largely unnoticed for many in this country.

As I have noted on many similar occasions, Remembering is one of the things that makes us so distinctly human. To remember those who have died is to acknowledge the importance of their lives - and the common humanity which we share with them in life and in death. Remembering is also one of the things that especially makes us Christian. To remember those who have gone before us in faith is to celebrate the multitude of ways in which the grace of God touched and transformed each one of them in life - and the hope which we still share with them after death.

On this Veterans' Day, I am particularly mindful of my father and my uncles who served in World War II and that whole "greatest generation," whose collective experience of sacrifice helped create the productive and more egalitarian society in which my generation grew up. One must also be mindful of those members of my cohort whose lives were so sadly cut short by war and the members of more recent generations who have served and sacrificed, often in wars which lacked the rationale or public support the World War II generation experienced.

The abolition of the military draft, whatever else it accomplished, served the cynical purpose of diminishing the previously widespread experience of and public identification with national service. The majority of citizens no longer experience what the ancients considered the primary responsibility of citizenship, transforming citizenship from a responsibility to a consumer-like claim to rights and privileges. It has also significantly privatized the sad experience of death, disablement, bereavement, and loss, now borne disproportionately by only certain Americans. Finally, it has also separated citizens from one another, whereas the former experience of serving alongside fellow citizens of different regions, religions, races, and ethnicities brought Americans together in a common cause. One wonders whether we would be experiencing the same degree of xenophobia and fear of difference if more of us had been exposed to one another as the World War II and Cold War generations were in military service?

Mother and Head of All the Churches

One day some 40+ years ago, my best friend in seminary was teasing me about my already disappearing hair. I responded, somewhat theatrically, by chasing him down the hall into the chapel, where he finally grabbed hold of the altar, and confidently declared, “You can’t hit me here. This is a church!” (And, no, I did not hit him. Actually, I had no intention of doing so. And, yes, we remain good friends to this day).

But my friend’s words that day always remind me what special places churches are. As a priest, I have been very fortunate to have served in two especially beautiful historic churches – for 10 years in the early 2000s here at Saint Paul the Apostle, the Paulist Fathers’ “Mother-Church” and for the next 10 years as pastor of Immaculate Conception Church, the Victorian Gothic “Mother Church” of Knoxville, TN. There are, of course, many beautiful churches and many styles of churches, each with its own richness. There are ancient Roman basilicas, rugged Romanesque churches, great gothic cathedrals, and beautiful baroque churches. Unfortunately, there are also any number of ugly churches to be seen, but that is another discussion for another day.

Yet, whatever they look like, churches are always special places. From time immemorial, people have had their special sites – hilltops, sacred springs, stone temples – to which to go to worship. God, of course, is not confined to any one place. Still, as human beings, we operate in space and time, which is why God himself became human – in a particular place and at a particular time in human history. So, it’s no surprise that, through the ages, God has continued to inspire his people to set aside special places in which to assemble to worship him. Solomon famously built the Jerusalem Temple to be a holy house of prayer and sacrifice. So too the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great built the Lateran Basilica in Rome to be the Pope’s special church, his cathedral, and hence “the mother and head of all the churches of the City and the world” – the anniversary of whose dedication on November 9, 324 A.D. the Church solemnly celebrates today.

When we celebrate the dedication of a church, we celebrate three things. We celebrate a place, a very special and sacred place set apart unlike any other. We celebrate a people, the people the place represents. And we celebrate a relationship, the relationship that binds the people together.

First, the place. The Lateran Basilica gets its name from the family, whose palace originally occupied the site. In the 4th century, the Emperor Constantine built a church – not in the center of what was still then a very pagan city, but at the city’s edge - a church that was to be the cathedral of Rome. Originally it was dedicated to Christ our Savior; but later Saint John the Baptist was added to the basilica's title. Hence its popular common name, the Basilica of Saint John Lateran.

The neighboring Lateran Palace became the papal residence, and the whole complex functioned as the center of Christian life in the city - until the Popes moved to Avignon, France, in the 14th century. When the popes finally moved back to Rome in 1377, the Vatican replaced the Lateran as the Pope’s principal residence.

Even then, up until the unification of the Kingdom of Italy in 1870 put an end to papal rule in Rome, it remained customary for the Pope to come to the Lateran to impart the Papal Blessing, Urbi et Orbi (To the City and to the World) on certain special days during the year. 

So that’s the place, a very special place. But, when we celebrate the dedication of a church, we also celebrate the people the place represents, for, as St. Paul reminded the Corinthians, We are God’s building [1 Corinthians 3:9c]. That is why the anniversary of a church’s dedication is celebrated liturgically as a feast for all those whose church it is. As the Pope's principal church, the cathedral church of Rome. Saint John Lateran is, in a sense, everyone’s church. Hence, its anniversary is celebrated universally.

It is no accident that one and the same name, “Church,” is used for both the people who continue Christ’s presence in the world and the place where they assemble to experience his presence most directly, by proclaiming his word and celebrating his sacraments.

But, when we celebrate the dedication of a church, and especially when we celebrate the dedication of a cathedral church, we also celebrate the relationship that binds its people together. As the site of the bishop’s cathedra, the chair from which the bishop exercises his teaching office and pastoral power within the local church, a cathedral is a sign of the unity of believers in the one faith, which the bishop proclaims and represents, which is why having a proper cathedral is so important in the life of a local church. As the Pope’s cathedral, the Lateran Basilica is a sign of our unity as believers in the one faith in which, as the successor of Saint Peter, the Pope unites the entire Church - all around the world and across the centuries.

Homily for the Anniversary of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, November 9, 2025.

Photo: Sacrosancta Lateranensis ecclesia omnium urbis et orbis ecclesiarum mater et caput (The most sacred church of the Lateran, the mother and head of all the churches of the city and the world), from the facade of the Lateran Basilica, Rome.

Nuremberg (The Movie)

 

As part of the late-940s early "baby boom" generation, I grew up in the shadow of World War II. My father and uncles had served in the war, and memories of the war (or, at least, of wartime) filled extended family conversations. And, of course, World war II was a popular focus for popular movies in that period - including Judgment at Nuremberg in 1961. Even before then, I had certainly heard about the trial - and the controversies about it - from m own family, even before reading about Senator Taft's criticism in JFK's Profiles in Courage.

Why World War II continues to fascinate subsequent generations so much is a subject worth considering in itself. For fascinate it does continue to do! So, here we are, 80 years after the end of the war with yet another, two and a half-hour, Nazi war crimes trial movie Nuremberg, directed by James Vanderbilt and starring Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring and Rami Malek as the army psychiatrist, Major Douglas Kelley, who is assigned to monitor the mental health of the Nazi prisoners, and who becomes personally engaged with Göring and even withhis family and most of all with the troubling issues the case raised. The film is based on the 2013 book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist by Jack El-Hai. 

Nuremberg is long, but it is worth the time it takes. The principal characters - Göring, Kelley, Sgt Howie Triest (played by Le Woodall), and Justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) - are all excellently portrayed, and at least the overall account seems largely rooted in historical events. (Even the account of Jackson's visit with the Pope has some factual basis. Jackson did travel from Nuremberg to Rome to attend Cardinal Spellman 's 1946 Consistory, although his explosive confrontation with Pope Pius XII, which reflects attitudes toward the Pope and the Church that became more prevalent only after Pius's death, seems hard to credit as historically factual.)

The film acknowledges the controverted legal questions that the trial raised, some of which are still debated today. Much of Nuremberg, however, focuses on the developing relationship between Kelley and Göring during their sessions together. Göring is determined to use his trial to support the Nazi ideals he still adheres to, while taking no personal responsibility for the Nazis' war crimes. Kelley, for his part, wants to write a book publishing his research on what goes on in the minds of Nazis. In real life, Kelley did write a book about the case, 22 Cells in Nuremberg, which was not well received in a world which wanted to believe that only Germans were susceptible to such criminality, and he eventually killed himself.

What Kelley discovers is that the Nazis aren’t all that unique or unusual from a psychiatric perspective, and that the crimes they committed cannot be ascribed to some uniquely German phenomenon. The film clearly want to take Kelley's side on this issue, somewhat unsubtly suggesting that the criminality prosecuted at Nuremberg reflects more universal evils, versions of which can easily recur, even in seemingly very different societies. The legal legacy of Nuremberg remains disputed and problematic, but the psychological insights Kelley took from his work in Nuremberg remain relevant and timely.

New York's Mamdani Moment

 

Since its capture by the British from the Dutch, New York City has had 110 mayors - from Thomas Willett to Eric Adams. As a result of this week's election, New York's 111th mayor will be Zohran Mamdani, an (until recently) almost unknown, 34-year old Queens State Assemblyman - a Ugandan-born, Manhattan-raised,  son of professor Mahmood Mamdani and filmmaker Nira Nairs, the city's first South Asian mayor, its first Muslim mayor, and the first immigrant mayor since Abe Beame, over 50 years ago.

He is also young. (He was only 28 when he first burst onto the political scene, winning an upset State Assembly contest in Astoria.) That itself is huge, in a Democratic Party the leadership of which seems strangely allergic to empowering its younger constituencies and activist members. To what extent this signifies serious generational change in the party remains to be seen, of course, but it clearly sends a signal. So does the turnout. More than two million voters turned out to vote. It has been decades (since 1969) since so many New Yorkers voted in a mayoral election. Mamdani won just over 50% of the vote with just over 1 million votes.

More important than his age is Mamdani's populism. There is a widespread recognition (except perhaps among some of the aging leaders of the party) that late-stage capitalism has created a cost-of-living crisis in this country and that, in the specific case of New York City the "greed is good" exploitation of this once affordable, once working-class city - so dramatically narrated by, among others, Jonathan Mahler's Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990) - has precipitated an immediate need for a new politics based on affordability. (The majority of New Yorkers are renters. The median monthly rent is over $3,000, while childcare costs average around $26,000 - a 43% increase between 2019 and 2024.) Unsurprisingly, Mamdani has put together a winning coalition of New Yorkers who want to make this city their home - for themselves and for their families - but who are acutely conscious of the struggle the present way of operating this city has caused them. For all Mamdani's youth and populist redistributive politics, this election stands in the long tradition of New York efforts to reclaim this city for all its citizens. This trend may have been reinforced by the victory of three ballot propositions that are aimed at further facilitating an increase in affordable housing.

More often than not, in this overwhelmingly Democratic city, the winner of the Democratic primary almost automatically wins the general election. This year, however, saw several leading Democrats decline to endorse the duly elected nominee of their party. (What that behavior might mean for the future of New York Democratic party politics remains to be seen.) The former Democratic Governor, Andrew Cuomo, who had resigned in disgrace after allegations (which he denies) of sexual harassment, lost decisively in the June primary but ran in the general election anyway as an Independent - well funded by some of the city's wealthy entitled elites. What better illustration of the issues at stake in this election and its epic character as a potential change election!

Mamdani probably benefitted from the flawed candidates he ran against. In addition to Cuomo, there was Eric Adams, the incumbent Democratic mayor who had run four years ago on a law-and-order platform, but who has been mired in accusations of corruption (which he denies) and an ambiguous association with President Trump. There was also Curtis Sliwa, famously the founder of the "Guardian Angels," a colorful character from the 1980s, on the Republican line. Adams eventually withdrew from the race and then endorsed Cuomo. This somewhat flawed set of opponents has certainly served Mamdani well, because, despite his personal charisma and energetic social-media campaign, also had vulnerabilities of his own.

Mamdani rose to prominence as a member of the Democratic Socialists, an idiosyncratic group associated with some off-the-charts cultural positions. But Mamdani won the Democratic party primary and has run as the Democratic party candidate - not the Democratic Socialist party candidate. He has laser-focused his campaign not on DSA woke fantasies but on affordability and related issues which concern actual New Yorkers. In European terms, he would qualify as a Social Democrat - a well established political identity and one completely compatible with liberal democracy. In American terms (given our bizarre historical allergy to Social Democracy) he might be better termed a "populist" with a strong traditionally progressive commitment to good and effective government that actually meets the needs of its citizens. In any case, he most certainly is not a "communist," as some ignorantly and maliciously have sought to label him. (What exactly is a "communist" anyway in 2025 - decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union?) As for his "socialism," when asked by the NY Times to name one issue he has changed his mind about, he identified "the role of the private market in housing construction."

Counterbalancing his real vulnerabilities has been Mamdani's personal charisma and likeability. Mamdani made his mark initially by going around the city, talking to; voters, asking people questions, and listening to them. In our current context of widespread alienation, a candidate who listens gets noticed. Indeed, it would seem that the more voters have been exposed to his effective campaign and his charismatic personality and the more they have heard him (as opposed to his hysterical opponents), the more many of them have come to like him. That probably reflects the fact that in this political era voters have come increasingly to value authenticity. Mamdani is one of those politicians (like Bernie Sanders) of whom one feels that he is saying what he believes, not first rehearsing his every word with focus groups and pollsters. Democratic socialism may not be the future of the Democratic party, but personal and political authenticity and a focus on issues that matter most to voters may well matter more in defining the future of the party.

Mamdani's principal challenger, Andrew Cuomo, is the scion of a storied Queen political dynasty, which now may join the Kennedy, Bush, and Clinton dynasties as mere memories from the past. However, hovering over this election has been another long-time New York presence from Queens - the current President of the United States, Donald Trump, who at the last moment endorsed Cuomo (whom he called "a bad Democrat"). For some - maybe many - New Yorkers, a vote for Mamdani was likely also another way to vote against Trump. Combined with the even bigger Democratic wins in Virginia and New Jersey and the victory of Proposition 50 in California, voters may well have been sending a message.

To quote another Cuomo, campaigns are poetry, governing is prose. To implement the aspirational poetry of Mamdani's campaign in the prose of urban public policy will pose many challenges. Other mayors have begun with great flourishes of enthusiasm (Lindsay, Koch, DeBlassio, even Adams) only to be stymied by the structural complexity of the city and its inertial politics. Historically, one of the major obstacle to mayoral success in New York has been the state government in Albany. Perhaps Trump's overwhelming unpopularity with New Yorkers may help bring NYC and Albany together for a change.

Photo: Shuran Huang for The New York Times.