Merry Christmas

 

Last week, some of us gathered in front of the TV to watch the 1951 Alastair Sim version of Charles Dickens’ classic, A Christmas Carol, reexperiencing Scrooge’s overnight conversion to Christmas. In the Gospel, as in Dickens, while a lot happens during the night, it is in the morning when it all comes together and begins to make a difference.

Now one might respond that, of course, Christmas has been going on all around us for several weeks now – so much so that some people perhaps may be getting tired of it already! What is there that is new to say after weeks of Christmas carols and shopping and parties? And, anyway, what is there that is so new to say some 2000+ years after the event that we call “the First Christmas”?

Well, let’s start by imagining that it had never happened! Well, for one thing, we wouldn’t be here this morning! And this beautiful church, that has graced this urban center now for 140 years, would never have been built! And, whatever year this would be, it wouldn’t be 2025 – Anno Domini 2025, the year of the Lord 2025. What happened that First Christmas was so fundamentally important that, even now, we still calculate our calendar and date our years from it.  But more important than numbers and dates, if Christmas had never happened, the whole history of the past 20 centuries would have been very, very different. And, even more important than that, we ourselves would be very different. As St. Augustine (354-430) so succinctly expressed it: “If [God’s] Word had not become flesh and had not dwelt among us, we would have had to believe that there was no connection between God and humanity and we would have been in despair.”

To which, some scowl might reply that, for all our holiday cheer, there is a lot less joy in the world than our carols claim. It has been a really rough year for a lot of people - people increasingly alienated from one another in our troubled and conflicted society, some struggling to buy groceries or pay a medical bill or, even worse, worried about being targeted for violent harassment and the dangers of deportation. It is not for nothing that we pray at Mass that we may be safe from all distress.

Our distress is real enough, as is our anxiety about it, but so must be our faith in the rest of our prayer - as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

As St. Paul put it in his letter to Titus, from which we just heard, the kindness and generous love of God our savior appeared, … so that we might be justified by his grace and become heirs in hope of eternal life. not because of any righteous deeds we had done but because of his mercy.

And what better models for this than the shepherds, whose their openness to the angel’s surprising message and their enthusiastic response, took them to Bethlehem!

In standard Nativity scenes, the shepherds seemingly stick around forever. They’re still kneeling there when the Magi arrive. In fact, they stayed just long enough to find Mary and Joseph and Jesus. And then the shepherds went back to work and to their ordinary lives. But nothing for them would ever be ordinary again. They returned glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen. However socially insignificant they may have been, however ordinary the lives they returned to, the kingdom of God was being born among them.

And, however ordinary we and our daily concerns may seem today, the kingdom of God is also being born among us – if only, like the shepherds, we hasten to find it in Mary’s Son, whose coming into the world represents a decisive transformation of our world.

The same Son of God who revealed himself to the shepherds in the Son of Mary continues to reveal himself to us in his Church this Christmas morning. Like the shepherds, we hasten with wonder to find him and to be found in turn. And, as his Church, we continue doing what the shepherds did, making known the message about this child in whom the kindness and generous love, the mercy and forgiveness, of God our savior have appeared and forever more continue to appear.

Among us this Christmas morning, no less than among those shepherds so long ago, the kingdom of God is being born, breaking into our otherwise ordinary, self-enclosed world and offering it the precious possibility of hope, which happens to be the special theme of the Jubilee year that is coming to an end.

So, when the last carol has been sung and we disperse from here to our happy homes and holiday meals (or perhaps, as many must, to a somewhat sad or lonely home, or to a modest, maybe meager meal), may that same precious and powerful hope move us and fill us and change us, as surely as it did those long ago shepherds – and so transform our frustration into fulfillment, our sadness into joy, our hatred into love, our loneliness into community, our rivals and competitors into brothers and sisters, and our inevitable death into eternal life. 

Merry Christmas!

Homily for Christmas Morning, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, December 25, 2025.

Confession?

 

Back in what some see as the Golden Age of U.S. Catholicism - the 20 years between the end of World War Ii and the end of Vatican II - frequent confession was increasingly the norm for American Catholics as ever greater numbers responded to exhortations to more frequent Communion and took advantage of the relaxed fasting rules to receive Communion more and more often. In elementary school during that period, we were routinely marched over to church - all 1000+ of us - on the first Thursday of every month, so that the parish priests could dutifully hear all of our confessions. Years later, when I was a pastor myself and was on the receiving end of school confessions, I remember listening to repeated defenses of the practice on the grounds that children needed to get into the habit. Personally I was always somewhat skeptical. Whatever the merits of frequent confession the habit argument seemed self-evidently weak, since it was precisely my generation that had been compelled to acquire the habit and that then had so spectacularly broken that same habit!

There are encouraging signs of religious revival in the U.S. and even in Europe, and certainly some people are going to confession. The sacrament has most certainly not died out, as some may have predicted not so long ago that it would. But the overall pattern of apparent decline may have been set decades ago. The story of the golden age of frequent confession and of its apparently sudden and unexpected collapse is ably told in James M. O'Toole, For I have Sinned: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America (Harvard U. Pr., 2025).

For anyone (like myself) who is old enough to remember the unique contours of pre-1965 American Catholic life, O'Toole's book is a true trip down memory lane. He begins with a series of historical vignettes - Saint Louis, MO, 1807, New York City, 1897, Milwaukee, 1944, New Orleans, 1951 - that he calls "Four snapshots of American Catholics going to confession," experiences "replicated across the landscape and across the decades." We hear some historic anecdotes about traveling missionaries from the early days of American Catholicism, how they heard confessions and promoted the observance of the sacrament on the frontier. Mainly, we get to remember what it was like - in what is still living memory - when parish priests heard confessions for hours on Saturday afternoons and eves of holy days, and people came in great numbers, weekly, monthly, and on special occasions like parish missions.

O'Toole gives us the experience from both sides of the confessional box. (The box itself gets a lot of attention - in loco publico et patenti in ecclesia.) We recall what the experience was like. - for men, for women, for children, and for different ethnic and linguistic groups. We rehearse the procedures one was expected to follow, from examining one's conscience to being sorry for one's sins, to actually confessing them, to perhaps being questioned or given advice, to saying the Act of Contrition, to finally saying one's penance. But he also gives us the confessor's perspective, how priests were prepared in the seminary for the major time commitment of hearing confessions and how priests themselves actually experienced celebrating the sacrament that was then so central to the rhythm of the week. (One curious omission is the special legislation and expectations concerning the confessions of priests and religious. I can recall how priests and religious were apparently expected to confess weekly and how religious women had to present themselves to their "extraordinary confessor" four times per year, usually at the Ember Days.)

For those interested in the intersection of confession with the law - once again an issue of some concern in certain jurisdictions - O'Toole recounts the famous 1813 case which laid the foundation for the legal protection of the seal of confession in New York, reaffirmed in 1817, and finally written into law in 1828.

How did this time-honored, so very widely practiced sacrament suddenly go into what has seemed like serious decline? O'Toole devotes an entire chapter to the rise of psychology - to early Catholic opposition, especially to Freudianism (e.g., famously Fulton Sheen), and then the rather thoroughgoing embrace of therapeutic culture not just by secular American society but by the Church itself (for example, in vocational recruitment for priests and religious). "Just as some early Catholic critics had feared, a clear sense of sin might be challenged or even abandoned, once psychology had been let through the mental door." And more was changing in Catholics' mental world than the embrace of psychology and psychotherapy, as Catholics in increasing numbers "were enjoying a sense of security, belonging, and self-confidence unknown to their parents and grandparents."

Unsurprisingly, "Collapse" gets a full chapter all its own, starting with an accumulation of dissatisfactions. "The very success of the clergy at urging frequent confession had generated problems of its own, swelling the numbers but creating a new set of expectations. ... Compounding all these reactions was a growing realization that much of what was confessed was trivial." Then, came Vatican II, which, among other things, "demonstrated that church leaders did not always agree with one another." Finally, the crisis over contraception became "a matter of who got to decide what was sinful and how church teaching would be presented and received."

The post-conciliar reform of the rites for celebrating the sacrament seems to get less attention than one might have expected. Rite Two never really caught on in popularity with laypeople, and Rite Three was never intended to be the norm, which effectively has left us with a rite little different from what had been the practice previously. O'Toole mentions but does not much develop the intriguing idea that we might think of the Church as being again where it was when the ancient canonical Penance died out and it took time to develop something new that was suited to a new time and place.

The author seems to have little expectation that efforts to return to more widespread use of confession have much chance to succeed; "lost worlds do not usually come back, no matter how idealized in memory." That said, he seems to recognize that something of value really has been lost. "Despite its many flaws, there was a solidarity in that world, a community formed through participation and collective activity that promoted a reassuring sense of belonging. It connected disparate individuals and families with one another and, they hoped, with the divine. The social distinctions that mattered elsewhere faded."

And, ultimately, there is the problem of our seemingly diminished sense of sin. "At risk of loss, too, is a larger framework for thinking about how we behave with one another, both personally and collectively. How are we to live out our ideals, and how come to terms with those times when we don't."

Do Not Be Afraid

 

In case anyone was in any doubt about what season this is, in less than two hours winter will officially begin. Meanwhile, in case anyone was wondering what makes this time of year so very special, the Church's official liturgy prays the following words at Morning Prayer today: There is no need to be afraid. In five days our Lord will come to us.

The imperative, do not be afraid, is one we hear a lot at this time of year. We will hear it most dramatically from the angel addressing the shepherds on Christmas night. We just heard it, somewhat more subtly, from the angel speaking in Joseph ‘s dream in today’s Gospel.

Of course, there is a lot about our present place and time to cause worry anxiety, and, indeed, fear. For many people today in our troubled and conflicted society, struggling to buy groceries or pay a medical bill or, even worse, worried about being targeted for violent harassment and the dangers of deportation, fear is omnipresent. In fact, fear has dominated much of our human history. Hence, perhaps the urgency with which the Christmas story seeks to free us from fear and keeps urging us: do not be afraid.

We know very little about Saint Joseph. Our parish’s founding pastor, Isaac Hecker, famously held up Saint Joseph as a model of someone who lived an ordinary life in the world, working at his trade, taking part in the ordinary activities of his community, raising a family. If he stood out at all in his society, it would have been because he was, what the Gospel calls, a righteous man – presumably a good thing to be in any age.

Righteous, but silent! Joseph never speaks in any gospel story. Instead, in silence, he dreams. In the 17th century, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously observed: To say God has spoken to someone in a dream is no more than to say someone dreamed that God spoke to him [Leviathan, 32]. Fortunately for us Joseph did not share such cynical modern sentiments and was open to God’s surprising intervention in his life.

The Gospel suggests that Joseph’s dream came just in time. We can only guess what Joseph’s original hopes and plans may have been for himself and his family – or, for that matter, what his fiancé Mary’s original hopes and expectations might have been – until, suddenly and unexpectedly, Mary was found with child through the Holy Spirit.

The gospel’s terse account invites us to imagine what a problem Mary’s pregnancy produced, what a jolt that must have been for Joseph, how confused and perplexed he must have been by such unexpected news! Confused and perplexed, groping in the dark, wondering what had happened to all his hopes and plans, trying to decide what to do, Joseph here stands for everyone who has ever been confused and perplexed by life, living from day to day wondering what will happen next, trying to do the best one can in situations that seem so much bigger than we can ever understand.

This was neither the first - nor would it be the last – time in human history that an unexpected pregnancy seemed more like a problem than a blessing. Ordinary life is full of blessings, but it also presents more than its share of frightening upsets and unexpected challenges. To recognize blessing where the world sees something frightening is in itself a great gift and blessing.

If Mary’s pregnancy and its complications came on Joseph unexpectedly, Joseph’s dream must have been just as unexpected – and, perhaps at least initially, quite as confusing. Waking up and marrying Mary anyway, just because he’d had a dream, didn’t seem to reflect common sense or any conventional expectations. 

In repairing his relationship with Mary, however, Joseph’s dream set the stage for the salvation of the world and the repairing of all its ruptured and ruined relationships.

There is a reason, after all, why we don’t celebrate Christmas in June, when the sun is high and the days are long and bright. We celebrate Christmas in December when the days are dark and short.  We celebrate it, as Joseph did, in a confusing and perplexing, often threatening and frightening world, where the bright light of the God who is with us seems itself at times little more than a dream. The marriage of Mary and Joseph was a marriage built on a dream – a dream which brought to birth Jesus, who is God’s dream for the salvation of the world, the divine dream that enlightens even the densest darkness.

And so, this Christmas, let us join Joseph in his dream - so that we too may be prepared to go forward, without fear, where the angel of the Lord leads us.

Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, December 21, 2025.

 

On Hecker's Birthday: Some Questions for the Future

 

Servant of God Isaac Hecker's 206th birthday today is an appropriate occasion to recall Hecker's hopes for the Catholic Church in our country and to reimagine what those very 19th-century expectations might still signify for us today. This year's election of Pope Leo XIV, his roots in Augustinian community and spirituality, his missionary experience in Latin America, and his inspired choice of name all invite enthusiasm and hope for the Church and evoke echoes of Hecker's hope in "the dawning light of an approaching, brighter, more glorious future for God's Holy Church."

Hecker, however, had more in mind than the (then highly unlikely) prospect of an American-born pope, when he expressed his hope that that future "sun will first rise on this continent and spread its light over the whole world." His hopeful expectation was rooted in his confident conviction that the Catholic Church had something special to offer America, which in turn had something special to offer the world. Whatever it may have made sense for Hecker to have hoped for in the 19th century, when the American empire was in its ascendancy, it is increasingly difficult to recognize the path to the fulfillment of those expectations in our present religious and political predicament. What are we to make of all this?

The great religious, social, and political forces which influenced the American scene in Hecker’s early life were the Second Great Awakening and the egalitarian democracy associated with the Jacksonian era in American politics. Hecker lived in the incandescent glow of these two formative phenomena, but their glow has sadly since gone considerably darker, with potentially catastrophic consequences for Hecker’s hopes.

More than its colonial-era predecessor, the Second Great Awakening (roughly from about 1790 to 1840) remade the United States into the very religious country it would recognizably remain until the late 20^th century, what Chesterton famously called “a nation with the soul of a church,” further disposing Americans to Hecker’s proposed “renewal of religion.” Meanwhile, the older Hecker brothers were very actively involved in Jacksonian-era New York Democratic Party politics. They saw political solutions in radical democracy and focused their activity on reform movements. Their younger brother Isaac, although his focus would soon shift to more explicitly religious concerns, remained attracted to the tenets of Jacksonian democracy all his life.

Having examined the leading intellectual and religious currents of his time, paying intense attention to his own inner spiritual sensibility, Hecker had finally found his permanent home in the Roman Catholic Church. Having found fulfillment in the Catholic Church, he never desired to look farther. Rather, he desired to devote his life to helping others to find the truth in the Catholic Church. Hecker’s enthusiasm for his new faith and his commitment to the Church permeated all his subsequent activities. He “not only became a most firm believer in the mysteries of the Christian religion, but a priest and a religious, hopes thus to die.” However his canonization cause may develop, he continues to provide a way to think about the search for God, the experience of conversion, the giving of oneself heroically in service, serving the Church's mission, and attentiveness to the direction of the Holy Spirit.

Like the 19th century’s most famous foreign observer and analyst of Jacksonian American society and institutions, the French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), Hecker appreciated the problem posed by the fundamentally fragmented character of American society with its fragile connections among individuals, and the dilemma of how to create a community capable of uniting such free individuals. De Tocqueville and Hecker came from completely different backgrounds, had very different experiences in the Catholic Church, and arrived at their conclusions by very different means. But, already in the 1830s, de Tocqueville had famously recognized both religion’s surprisingly beneficial contribution to American democracy and even more surprisingly acknowledged Catholicism’s utterly unexpected compatibility with American democracy, which would likewise serve as one of Hecker’s bedrock convictions.

Thus, at his very first audience with Blessed Pope Pius IX, on December 22, 1857, in response to the Pope’s concern about factional conflict in the United States, “in which parties get each other by the hair,” Hecker had confidently replied that  “the Catholic truth,” once known, “would come between” parties and act like oil on troubled waters.” For Hecker, the Roman Catholic Church, not only represented true religion but was also potentially a powerfully unifying force, binding citizens together, and thus blunting the dangerously sharp cutting edges of conflict and dissension, fusing the private interests of individuals and factions into a common social and civic unity.

Having himself experienced the divided and fragmented character of American religion, Hecker eagerly embraced what the Catholic Church had to offer society, as the divinely sanctioned means for the fulfillment of Christ’s life and mission on earth, pouring the oil of the Holy Spirit on the troubled waters of the world. His high hopes for what the Church has to offer American society remain compelling in our own religiously and otherwise fragmented century, in which the Church is constantly being challenged to incarnate a communal experience of the Body of Christ in the world, which responds to the deepest desires and questions of people both outside and inside the Church.

For all his confidence in providence, however, Hecker recognized that his hopes and expectations would not be fulfilled automatically. He recognized the real limitations of his co-religionists. It was his mission to rouse “sluggish and unfaithful Catholics” from their “apathetic and torpid state.”  “The Catholic faith alone,” he famously wrote to Orestes Brownson, “is capable of giving to people a true permanent and burning enthusiasm fraught with the greatest of deeds. But to enkindle this in others we must be possessed of it first ourselves.”

Hecker’s hopes were rooted in personal and communal religious renewal. “The renewal of the age depends on the renewal of religion.”

But what of the country Hecker so much admired and for which he had such high hopes and expectations? Much of what Hecker admired about America, including the egalitarianism and sociability which de Tocqueville analyzed, and which Jacksonian democracy celebrated, no longer characterize the post-industrial, corporate, technocratic, centralized state which the United States has since become, quite apart from any contemporary flirtation with despotism. When it comes to the transforming power of religion, how effective will citizens “be possessed of it themselves” in this very different, late capitalist, increasingly authoritarian society? Changes in society have increased the need for the religious renewal Hecker anticipated, while problematically limiting the prospects for such renewal.

Here some of de Tocqueville’s cautions may be instructive, for he filtered his experience of American democracy through a pre-modern sensibility, which Hecker, despite his conversion and his European formation, largely lacked. Like Hecker, de Tocqueville recognized that, in our modern era of democratic nationalism, religion was perhaps the only resource well positioned to overcome self-interested individualism and hold divided societies together. De Tocqueville, however, was more alert to modern democracy’s potentially corrosive effects upon religion and to how extensively American religion would accommodate religious values to material success and the overwhelming desire for prosperity. Indeed, contemporary experience increasingly confirms the analytical insight that Americans may be more likely to resolve any cognitive dissonance between their religion and their politics by adjusting their religion. (On this, see, for example,, Putnam and Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Unites and Divides Us, 2010).The extent to which the Church and religion in general have themselves been reimagined by American society and politics rather than acting as the expected agents of cultural conversion stands as one of the single greatest challenges to Hecker’s hopes and expectations.

All this was the case even before the unprecedented present political situation of political authoritarianism in which our country currently finds itself. Situationally better positioned than Hecker to appreciate the classical expectation of democracy’s potential degeneration into despotism, de Tocqueville recognized how the social isolation and alienation from civic life which accompany modern democratic capitalism, while correctable (as Hecker hoped) by religion, could just as likely lead instead to despotism.

Of that, de Tocqueville, unlike Hecker, had direct experience. The despotism of Napoleon III “will last a long time,” de Tocqueville wrote, “because its only obstacle will be itself.” Hecker obviously could not foresee that something analogous would develop in the United States in the 21st century. His exaggerated confidence in American democratic exceptionalism seems no longer tenable, however, and the role he hoped the Church would be able to play in our increasingly failing democracy appears even more problematic.

What are we to make of all this? How can our increasingly fragmented religious energies be renewed and rechanneled to serve once again as “oil on the troubled waters” in a context of accelerating violence, late capitalist divisiveness, and authoritarian democratic despotism?

In the face of all this, what religious, devotional, and pastoral strategies can contemporary American Catholics turn to in order to transcend apathy and torpidity to retrieve the role Hecker had once so hopefully envisioned for the Church in this country?

Jane Austen at 250

 

Today is Jane Austen's 250th birthday!

When I was in high school, we were assigned Jane Austen's most famous novel, Pride and Prejudice, in English class. For some reason or other, I failed to read it, a failure reflected in my subsequent poor grade. Of all the works of literature I was exposed to in my youth, Pride and Prejudice was perhaps one of the most worthwhile, and I have since then more than made up for my youthful failure both by reading Jane Austen's most famous novel and watching multiple film versions of it.

Jane Austen's stories are set in Regency Britain, yet have obviously acquired a universal appeal which makes her still one of the most popular authors today. Her writing reflected the world she lived in and the real day-to-day concerns for financial security in an insecure world (especially for women like herself). While social conditions are much altered in important respects, that basic preoccupation remains a reality for so many people. So does romance, the need for which and the complexities of which, remain regular realities as. much now as then - and often as interconnected with family dynamics and financial insecurities now as then.

Combine those perennial themes with beautifully written language, interesting and relatable characters so powerfully and poignantly portrayed, and a general ambience of good manners and attractive if flawed people and situations, what is not to like? The continued popular appeal of her novels and their filmed adaptations answers that question.

Hanukkah for Today's World

 

The Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, which begins tonight, may be perhaps the most accessible of such observances for us gentiles. Unlike the great classical Jewish pilgrimage festivals, which reflect ancient agricultural calendars, Hanukkah commemorates a comparatively modern historical event. Back in the second century BC, Israel was part of the post-Alexander the Great Hellenistic world and was ruled by the Syrian-Greek Seleucids, whose king Antiochus IV Epiphanes sought to force the Jews not only assimilate to the prevailing Hellenistic Greek culture and beliefs but also to abandon the Torah and its religious observances entirely. Amazingly, a small army of faithful Jews, led by Judah the Maccabee, rose up in revolt, defeated the Seleucid king, and for a time successfully drove the Greeks from the land, and restored an independent Jewish kingdom. Within the context of this larger military victory, the Maccabees successfully reclaimed the Temple in Jerusalem, restored the cycle of sacrifices and worship, and rededicated the Temple to God's service.

In this time of resurgent anti-semitism (of both left and right-wing varieties), Hanukkah has a special salience that extends beyond its religious observance. Of course, like Christmas, Hanukkah has obvious elements of a winter light festival and these are among its most visible and popular aspects, notably the required daily lighting of the menorah, including Manhattan's large outdoor menorah (photo). Nonetheless, our contemporary context with its widespread challenge of increasing anti-semitism invites reflection on the historical as well as the miraculous events being commemorated.

The Christian commitment to combat anti-semitism may have been very late in coming, but it was authoritatively established by the magisterium of the Second Vatican Council 60 years ago in Nostra Aetate, the Council's Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions. In his My Journal of the Council, Yves Congar (1904-1995) detailed the difficulties even the relatively moderate language of Nostra Aetate faced. Yet, he rightly noted, "Twenty years after Auschwitz, it is impossible that the Council should say nothing" (May 3, 1965). Fortunately, the Council did not say nothing, even if it has taken another 60 years to develop its teaching more fully.

As Christians, we do not celebrate Hanukkah. But we may join our Jewish brothers and sisters in recalling God's call and promises to his people and join with them in spirit as they pray the Hannukah blessings:

Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments, and commanded us to kindle the Hanukkah light.

Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who performed miracles for our ancestors in those days, at this time.

Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who performed miracles for our ancestors in those days, at this time.

O Christmas Tree!

Putting up "the Tree" has long been an infallible sign that Christmas is coming closer. When I was but a boy in the Bronx in the 1950s, my parents used to purchase a Christmas Tree, usually from a local neighborhood vendor, a few days before the holiday and then left it out in the cold on the fire escape outside my bedroom window until it was time to decorate it. Typically, that would happen on Christmas Eve or maybe a day or two before. Over the years, the almost universal tendency everywhere - not just in stores and commercial settings but also in homes and even in churches - has been to set up and decorate Christmas Trees earlier and earlier. The lamentable but widespread practice of using an artificial "Tree," which obviously avoids the problem of how to keep it from drying out too much indoors, has contributed to this ever earlier decorating. Nowadays, some homes even put up their Christmas Tree as early as Thanksgiving, thus imitating commercial establishments for which the Christmas Tree is less a symbol of the Savior's birth than an invitation to endless Christmas shopping.

Whenever the Tree appears, however, it is invariably a sign of joy and a symbol of hope. Something special happens to a room when the Christmas Tree is put in its place and lights begin to appear on its branches. Against the cold gloom of a December afternoon and the sheer blackness of a long winter night, the Christmas Tree stands as the silent but bright reminder of what the Gospel for Christmas Day proclaims: The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world (John 1:9).

Although some earlier forms of tree decorations existed, such as the medieval "Paradise Tree" adorned with apples for mystery plays, popular legend attributes our modern Christmas Tree to 16th-century Germany and in particular to Martin Luther. How accurate the legend about Martin Luther and the domestication of the Christmas Tree actually is probably cannot be resolved. That said, it still speaks powerfully to what the Christmas Tree signifies. 

According to the legend, Luther, walking through a forest one winter night, was struck by the sight of a fir tree sparkling in the starlight. Thus inspired, he cut down one small fir tree and brought it indoors, replicating the light of the stars with the light of candles on the tree's branches, thus making the illuminated fir tree into a symbol of the light of Christ coming into the world. Christmas is indeed the ultimate winter light festival, and the Christmas Tree is the most common domestic expression of this symbolism.

Along with millions of others all over the world this week and next, we are decorating our Christmas Tree. These are not the best of times. Yet Christmas comes faithfully in good times and bad to lift up our depleted spirits just as it lifts up our gaze to its evergreen branches and bright and beautiful lights. Face-to-face with Christmas, we are enabled to get beyond our anger against one another and our justified anxieties about our future and once again feel loved and look forward with hope.

Our Hope in Terrible Days

 

Just 171 years ago in 1854, while guiding a Church still struggling to recover from the calamitous experience of the French Revolution, Blessed Pope Pius IX formally defined the Church’s faith in the Blessed Virgin Mary’s Immaculate Conception – Mary's fullness of grace from the very beginning of her earthly existence, "Adorned from the first instant of her conception with the radiance of an entirely unique holiness" [Vatican II, Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium, 56]. Mary’s fullness of grace, Pius IX taught, exists because she received it freely, before any action on her own part, “in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race” [Apostolic Constitution Ineffabilis Deus (December 8, 1854)]. 

Almost immediately after that dogmatic definition, San Francisco's Old Cathedral of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception, the first purpose-built California Cathedral and now a parish served by the Paulist Fathers, was dedicated at Midnight Mass that Christmas. Not long after, the parish where I pastored for 10 years in Knoxville, Tennessee, dedicated the following September, was also one of the early churches dedicated to the Immaculate Conception.

Already in 1846, the Bishops of the United States had unanimously placed the United Sates "under the special patronage of the holy Mother of God, whose immaculate conception is venerated by the piety fo the faithful throughout the Catholic Church" [6th Provincial Council of Baltimore, Pastoral Letter, 1846]. Much more recently, in the mid-20th-century, the famous American Catholic convert and Cistercian monk Thomas Merton, who was one of the four famous Americans Pope Francis mentioned in his address to Congress in 2015, wrote in his Journal that the definition of the Immaculate Conception “was a turning point in the modern history of the Church." Merton continued: "The world has been put into the hands of our Immaculate Lady and she is our hope in the terrible days we live in.” [November 10, 1947]          

What exactly did Merton mean by that seeming indulgence in mid-20th-century American Catholic triumphalism? Although a feast honoring Mary's conception had originated in the Eastern Church by perhaps as early as the fifth century, was celebrated in the West by the ninth century, and was extended to the Universal Church as a feast of obligation in 1708, intellectuals had argued - as intellectuals do - about the meaning and truth of the doctrine for centuries before it was finally definitively defined. 

Once the doctrine had been defined, the Immaculate Virgin Mary herself seemed to weigh in on the issue. In February 1858, she appeared to a poor, rather sickly girl in a riverside grotto in an off-the-beaten-track town in southern France, and surprisingly identified herself with the mysterious words, “I am the Immaculate Conception.” That title was surprising and mysterious to the young visionary, Bernadette Soubirous, who did not at that time understand the meaning of those strange-sounding words.

Even today, many may wonder at this unique title of Mary, which might easily be misinterpreted almost as some sort of esoteric advantage Mary was awarded apart from any immediate connection with the rest of us. Yet, as Mater Populi Fidelis, the recently published "Doctrinal Note on Some Marian Titles Regarding Mary’s Cooperation in the Work of Salvation," has reminded us "grace makes us like Christ." As "the most perfect expression of Christ’s action that transforms our humanity," Mary manifests "all that Christ’s grace can accomplish in a human being." 

That, I think, is what it means  to call Mary "our hope in the terrible days we live in.”

Indeed, these are "terrible days." So much that was not so long ago taken for granted - whether in religion or politics or human relations -  has now gone so seemingly wrong. Inevitably, we are left wondering what has happened and why and how (if at all) we can get our conflicted world back on track. Yet however "terrible" these days may appear, the Immaculate Conception is a salutary reminder of the far more promising reality which has entered into our troubled world.

As today's liturgy reminds us, Adam and Eve experienced "terrible days." It is comforting to consider that our salvation in Christ and Mary's role in it were all already in process from the time when sin first entered our world, which means the human race was never beyond hope. The distresses and difficulties we currently endure may be particular to our time and place, but the experience of distress is seemingly universal. We have, however, been delivered from distress by the possibility of solidarity - a solidarity in grace which overcomes our solidarity in sin. That solidarity is signified powerfully by Mary's initial and permanent fullness of grace.

I was born less than a year after Merton's "terrible days" Journal entry. I grew up in the New York City borough of the Bronx, a few blocks from the small cottage to which the poet Edgar Allan Poe had moved in the same year that the U.S. Bishops had proclaimed Mary the patroness of the United Sates under the title of her Immaculate Conception. The cottage, which still bears Poe's name, was within walking distance of St. John's College (now Fordham University), where Poe became friends with the college's Jesuits and enjoyed the vibrations of the college's church bells.

In his poem, A Catholic Hymn, which referenced the daily Marian prayer announced by the ringing of those bells, Poe prayed Mother of God, be with me still. Appreciating how God's grace given to Mary signifies our solidarity with her and with her Son, may help us too in these "terrible days." Or, as the poet put it:

Now, when storms of fate o’ercast

Darkly my Present and my Past,

Let my future radiant shine

With sweet hope of thee and thine!

Photo: Immaculate Conception Window, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN.

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.