The U.S. Presidency Thanks to John Adams

 

For almost a century now, January 20 has been Presidential Inauguration Day,  the day power passes from one president to another, a day filled with quaint civic rituals to solemnize the tradition of the peaceful transition of political power, something we generally took for granted as being as American as apple pie - that is, until six years ago. Then we discovered - and have continued to learn ever since - just how fragile republican government really is and the variable human factors on which republican government, constitutionalism, the rule of law, elections, and the peaceful transfer of power all actually depend. What better time than this, therefore, to revisit the often overlooked but actually quite significant presidency of John Adams, who set so many important presidential precedents, not least that of the peaceful transition of power from one party to another.

There are numerous good biographies of John Adams, but they have largely tended to highlight other (more seemingly successful) aspects of his storied career and focus less on his one-term presidency. In contrast, Lindsay M. Chervinsky, Executive Director of the George Washington Presidential Library, focuses almost entirely on Adams as our second president in her new book, Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Adams served as our first Vice President, under George Washington, who himself set many presidential precedents, including that of excluding his Vice President from serious participation in the Administration. According to Chervinsky, Adams' first of many critical contributions to the new nation's survival was simply proving "that someone else could be president" after Washington left office. "Washington established countless executive precedents, but until they were repeated, they were little more than historic anomalies. Adams forged the parameters of the presidency for everyone that followed."

Key among those parameters, was Adams' forceful assertion of presidential authority over the military and the executive branch itself. "Adams' cabinet secretaries conspired with other Arch Federalists to weaken the presidency, and undermine civilian leadership of the military." Adams successfully reasserted the presidential claim to control the military as a civilian, successfully countered cabinet subversion of his foreign policy initiatives, and by removing recalcitrant cabinet secretaries definitively established presidential power over the cabinet. Also, again at the cost of fracturing his Federalist party and imperiling his own re-election, he secured peace with France. The Treaty of Mortefontaine "represented the pinnacle of Adams' lengthy foreign policy career and validated his economic instincts." Likewise in his attention to the judiciary, Adams recognized "the long-term importance of the bench."

Chervinsky's account of the Adams' administration is detailed and highlights many ways  Adams' semingly transitional presidency has left a long legacy. But perhaps the most significant - especially in the light of our recent history - was his commitment to republican government, constitutionalism, the rule of law, elections, and the peaceful transfer of power, all of which he demonstrated in his response to the electoral crisis of 1800. That election took place over a period of time. It "was actually a series of elections, first at the state level to control legislatures, then is siew of tates with direct elections for electors, and finally at the electoral college level." Given our recent experience of states' competing to reapportion congressional districts in time for the 2026 midterm elections, her account of the various maneuvers in 1800 to alter the ways electors were to be selected in order to maximize one or other party's advantage seems especially timely. So is the role of personalities and personal relationships. "Government was a small world int he eighteenth century, and politicians often knew each other or were related." While the family backgrounds of contemporary politicians may be much more diverse, modern media has made politics a small world agin in a different way, whcih also highlights personalities and personal relationships.

Famously, the election of 1899 resulted in a tie which threatened the very survival of the system. "Jefferson flirted with political violence and came perilously close to upending democratic institutions." In the end, however, Adams and Jefferson "put aside petty grievances nad worked together, honoring their commitment to basic civic virtue." Everyone knows Adams did not attend Jefferson's inaugural (which he was not particularly expected to do), but Chervinsky details the ways in which he and the executive departments cooperated with and assisted the incoming administration, another valuable precedent. 

Sandwiched in between Washington and Jefferson, Adams never. made to Mount Rushmore. His actual contributions as president deserve to be remembered, however, and the precedents he set - especially in regard to republican government, constitutionalism, the rule of law, elections, and the peaceful transfer of power have served the U.S. very well. In view of more recent events and our present sleepwalking flirtation with despotism, those precedents deserve to be recalled, and their author deserves to be better remembered and honored.

The Future Is Burning

 

Wildfires have increased everywhere - even in such unfamiliar locales as the New York City metropolitan area. But, in 2025, the apparent capital of contemporary wildfires interfacing with highly populated metropolitan centers was California, specifically the city of Los Angeles, where some of the worst wildfires in California history erupted onJanuary 7, 2025, in the Pacific Palisades and later in Altadena. Senior Political and National Correspondent for MSNOW Jacob Soboroff covered those fires as they burned and has now recounted that experience and analyzed its meaning in Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America's New Age of Disaster (HarperCollins, 2026).

Soboroff is an accomplished correspondent, who has covered both natural and human-made disasters. His previous book, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy (2020), detailed the first Trump Administration's systematic separation of immigrant families at the border and exposed the policy's devastating impact. He is also an LA native and resident, who brings to this account a personal story of family and community impacted by apparently unexpected (but perfectly predictable) calamity. His on-air coverage, faithfully recorded in the book, and his depictions of his experience covering the fire in the places where he grew up among others he had grown up with give this book an intensely personal feel, simultaneously celebrating rootedness and lamenting loss. In this age of delocalized globalism, with its endemic loss of commitments to places and local communities, Soboroff's account offers unexpected inspiration, even as it recounts a catastrophic calamity and countless personal, familial, and neighborhood experiences of loss. At one point, surveying the somehow still standing synagogue where he had once had his Bar Mitzvah, Soboroff acknowledged, "I felt I was exactly where I was supposed to be."

The January 2025 Firestorm was the result of a deadly combination of high wind gusts, low humidity, and accumulated dry vegetation.  As difficult as were the personal losses and environmental devastation Soboroff recounts is his on-site, real-time reporting on how certain prominent public figures responded to the disaster. California Governor Gavin Newsom and lame-duck President Joe Biden (who just happened to be on the scene when the fires started) both responded creditably, as we used to expect al our public officials to do. Elon Musk,  however, posted misinformation on his social platform "X," and President-elect Donald Trump  falsely claimed that Governor Newsom was withholding water that should have been available to fight the fires.

Obviously, the most compelling parts of the book are scenes of turmoil which Soboroff describes so well, his interviews with first responders struggling to maneuver fire trucks running out of fuel and hydrants low on water pressure, and his poignant conversations with those who lost virtually everything in a moment of horror. No less important, however, ishis treatment of the terrible political context — not just Trump’s spreading misinformation about the fires and berating the Governor and other officials for being ineffective — but also the policies of the second Trump administration in the months since the fires to “refute, dismantle, or outright eliminate valuable resources within the federal government’s arsenal to communicate about, respond to, mitigate, or prevent disasters.”

As contributing factors to the 2025 LA tragedy and also setting the stage for the future, he identifies the global climate emergency, infrastructure disintegration, the changes in the ways we now live, and our politics of blame and disinformation. That is what makes his riveting account of last year's calamity in California a warning and a challenging portent about "America's New Age of Disaster."

In This Bleak Midwinter

 

January is invariably a bleak month. Although the hours of daylight are beginning to increase slightly, that daytime sky is as often as not overcast. In any case, the operative contrast is a stark one between the festive lights of the Christmas season and the empty dark spaces where the Christmas Trees and other holiday lights so recently were. Personally, I always feel a certain sadness the day the Christmas Tree goes out in the trash (photo), and I suspect many others experience similar post-Christmas sadness.

In 2026, however, this midwinter bleakness is exacerbated not by nature and the season, but by what we are sadly experiencing socially and politically in this unprecedented time of troubles, brought about by the widespread breakdown of democratic aspirations.

Here in New York City, we can watch (and hear) nurses picketing some New York hospitals in a very timely challenge to the profit-making mentality that dominates the American medical system. Before his election, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who joined the nurses on their picket line on the first day of the strike, had said that the city “needs to reconsider its relationship to wealthy private hospital systems.” Indeed, as the expiration fo the ACA subsidies and Washington's inability to restore them has revealed, it may be -  may be already past - time for all Americans to reconsider our relationship to a health-care system which makes some rich, while leaving the rest poor and barely cared for.

But the situational center of our nation right now is not New York, let alone Washington, but Minneapolis. Few things highlight the moral depths to which our country has descended more starkly than the recent slaughter of Renee Good in her car on a Minneapolis street. As if attacks on law-abiding immigrants and refugees on their way to work or school or church were not bad enough, ordinary American citizens are now themselves being targeted, attacked, and killed.

Compared to that, intellectual abominations like the censoring of Plato's Symposium in a Texas school may seem small matters. But, in fact, such scandalous policies confirm Socrates' significant insight - illustrated in his own experience of trial and execution - that dedication to wisdom, truth, morality must inevitably put one at odds with a decadent demagogic polity.

More immediately terrifying in practice than the censoring of Plato is the threat (whether real or propaganda bluster remains yet to be seen) to attack Greenland, an act of unjustified war against a NATO ally (the kingdom of Denmark), which could well herald the untimely death of that once great alliance. Undoubtedly, American troops could march from their base into Nuuk, Greenland's capital, and raise the American flag, fully expecting to get away with such an act of wanton aggression. But the cost will be real in killing an 80-year effort to minimize war in world affairs, and it will leave the U.S. friendless in an increasingly unfriendly world.

In her famous Christmas poem, In the Bleak Midwinter, Christina Rossetti contemplated the contrast between our bleak and limited existence and the gift given us in the Incarnation with its possibility for human transformation by grace - the one and only true alternative to the false pseudo-Christian religion of power, domination, and control, currently being preached by our leaders.

Beloved Son

 

Last Sunday, the Church celebrated the Epiphany, one of the oldest and greatest festivals in the Christian calendar. Epiphany is sometimes called “Little Christmas,” as if it were a very junior member of the Christmas family, even though Epiphany is actually older than Christmas. It is also commonly called “Three Kings Day,” correctly highlighting the story of the Magi but ignoring what happened after. In fact, in the Eastern Churches the story of the Magi is read on Christmas Day, and Epiphany celebrates the Baptism of the Jesus by John. In the West, we remember the Magi on Epiphany and Jesus’ Baptism on the following Sunday.

So what? One might ask!  In the United States today, Christmas, after going on almost non-stop since Halloween, has finally fizzled out, making Epiphany and the Baptism seem more like some vestigial post-Christmas afterthought. But, if we shift gears and allow ourselves to think the way the Church thinks about these things, then we see that today’s remembrance of Jesus’ baptism is actually the culmination of the whole Advent-Christmas season, the event Advent and Christmas have been leading up to. Today we fast-forward from Bethlehem to an adult Jesus, about to begin his public life, the work he came into the world to do, the long-term point of the Christmas story.

Jesus’ baptism by John is mentioned in three of the four gospels and alluded to in the fourth, which by a quirk of the calendar we will also hear this year, next Sunday. And, as we just also heard [Acts 10:34-38], Jesus’ baptism by John was referenced by Peter when he baptized the first pagan converts, Cornelius, the Roman soldier, and his household. So, Jesus’ baptism by John was obviously well remembered and had obviously left an impression. Peter treats Jesus’ baptism as the starting-point of the Jesus story – how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, after which Jesus went about doing good and healing all those oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. Later, after the Ascension, when Peter would propose choosing a replacement for Judas, his criterion was someone who accompanied us the whole time the Lord Jesus came and went among us beginning form the baptism of John [Acts 1:21-22].

John’s baptism had famously been a ritual of repentance, dramatizing one’s need for conversion and one’s willingness to start anew, as their ancestors had when they had first passed through the Jordan River to enter the Promised Land. By being baptized by John, Jesus blended into the mass of anonymous sinners that we are. By being baptized as one of us, Jesus joined us - which was, of course, the point of his being born in the first place.

Jesus joined us in the water; but, when he came up from the water, we are told, behold, the heavens were opened for him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming upon him. And a voice came from the heavens saying, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

Not just Jesus alone but the whole Trinity joined in to reveal who Jesus is. Jesus began his work in the world by being officially identified by his Father as his Son, anointed, as Saint Peter put in today’s 2nd reading, with the Holy Spirit and power, thus setting the stage for the rest of the story of Jesus life and mission in our world.

And not just Jesus’ story, but ours too! Not Jesus’s life and mission, but ours too! Thanks to Jesus, we too – like Cornelius – have become acceptable to God, for Jesus has shared the Holy Spirit with us. Through his gift of the Holy Spirit, we have been empowered to profess our faith in Jesus as God’s Son and to join ourselves with him so as to share in his relationship with his Father. Jesus’ baptism anticipates the baptism that elevates each of us to a new relationship with the Father and the Holy Spirit and empowers us to continue Christ’s life and mission in our world through our membership in his Church.

Jesus, the beloved Son, has made us beloved sons and daughters of his Father. But being beloved is a challenge as well as an opportunity. Having let us in on his story, on who he is and the total trajectory of his life, Jesus’ baptism challenges us to identify with that trajectory and to recognize the intended trajectory of our own lives and to respond accordingly.

Homily for the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, January 11, 2026.

Stan and Gus

 

The Gilded Age is not just an amazing HBO series. It was also a real era in New York City's life and remains real today, monumentally so, in its grandiose public spaces and art. Some noteworthy examples of that public art are found in the Paulist Fathers' "Mother Church," the Church of Saint Paul the Apostle at 59th Street and 9th Avenue in midtown Manhattan. When that church was being built in the 1880s, the Paulist Fathers' founder and the first pastor of the parish called in for consultation three of the most eminent, contemporary artists, John LaFarge, Stanford White, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. 

Henry Wiencek, STAN and GUS: The Ardor and the Friendship That Built the Gilded Age (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025) is the complicated story of two of those artists, architect Stanford White (1853-1906), who designed the church's majestic main altar with its beautiful baldacchino, toward which all the lines of the church can be said to converge, and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907), whose student, Frederick MacMonnies, made the three gilded angels above the baldacchino, and another student, Bela Pratt, produced the church's glorious statue of Our Lady of hte Annunciation, carved from Carrara marble in the form of a lily bud about to bloom. (None of this work is referenced in Wiencek's book.)

Wiencek's account recalls the partnership between those two famous Gilded Age artists - both their public professional partnership and their private personal relationship, revealing details about their personal and family lives, which their admiring public probably did not know and which would have likely diminished the public's positive perception of them as persons and perhaps also diminished for some the appeal of their artistry.

The two artists, White and Saint-Gaudens, came from decidedly different backgrounds and had notably different personalities, but became close collaborators as well as personal friends. Wiencek traces how they overcame their circumstances to become the successful artists whose works we remember, and how they relied upon each other for emotional support and professional advancement. The author highlights important early stages in their professional advancement - among them Trinity Church in Boston and the Farragut statue in New York. Along the way, we get a close-up picture of the artists' idiosyncrasies.

From time immemorial, artists have depended upon patrons - particularly rich patrons. Wiencek's account highlights this peculiar alliance. It is a story of artistic genius, constrained (only minimally as it turned out) by financial dependence upon rich patrons, but otherwise floating freely through the moral abyss of Gilded Age oligarchy. The Gilded Age may compare somewhat favorably to our contemporary experience of oligarchy, in that the Robber Barons - in contrast to our contemporary oligarchs - did in fact actually produce things of value (e.g., railroads) and cultural products of public benefit (e.g., libraries, churches, monumental statuary). Although White and Saint-Gaudens did inevitably produce some artworks for private use and benefit (including White's now torn-down private mansions), they also produced a great amount of properly public art, among them the many statues which were apparently all the rage in the post-Civil War era. Much of this public art remains and continues to enrich our social and cultural landscape, even as it also continues to remind us of the economic dislocation of the era that commissioned it - and the moral failures of the artists who successfully produced it.

Genius has often become an excuse for anti-social behavior. There are repeated instances described in the book where exasperated patrons - for example, Henry Adams and the Rector of Ascension Church - ultimately fell in love with the art they had commissioned, despite their frustrations and anger with the artists' entitled approach to their commitments. Nonetheless, the book illustrates quite clearly how obnoxious those artists (Saint-Gaudens especially) could be and how frustrating it was to commission work from them. Although he came to appreciate the end product, Henry Adams' outburst about Saint-Gaudens when he was working on Adams' wife's memorial is illustrative. "If I could, I should club St. Gaudens and Stanford White, and put them under their own structures. Nothing has distressed. me like their outrageous disregard  of my feelings in this matter. Never spare an architect or artist hereafter. Make their lives intolerable and have no pity, for they will have none on you."

Other victims of the artists' self-centeredness were, of course, their wives. Even allowing for the very different attitudes toward marriage at that time, some of their behavior toward their wives and their official families failed even by such lenient standards. Wiencek recounts in considerable detail the varied affairs conducted by the two men, as well as exploring the romantic and sexual aspects of their own relationship with each other. He does so journalistically without sensationalizing. The book is not primarily an expose of the two men's sexual affairs or of their own love affair. Still, their chaotic sexual behavior gets the treatment it requires as defining aspects of their mutual relationship and of their relationships with others.

Not only were the artists intimately part of a filthy rich social circle, with all the narcissism and abuses of power that accompany excessive wealth, they were also central to a social circle of sexual adventure, which combined an artistic inclination to sexual freedom with the privileges of wealth to abuse others. Most extremely, with White, the result anticipated some of the sort of depravity so recently exposed in the Jeffrey Epstein saga - also a story of licentiousness empowered by the power and attractiveness of wealth, and rich people covering for one another. The result in White's case, of course, was his murder in public at Madison Square Garden, the event which blew the lid off the false front of respectability he had managed to maintain. 

STAN and GUS tells an important story about a world most of us non-artists have no experience or understanding of. It also confronts us with the ambivalent legacy of an era of out-of-control oligarchy, which produced so much we can and should value in public spaces and public art. It also challenges us to evaluate the moral costs of indulging uninhibited sexual freedom, licentiousness, and depravity among the rich and talented, with comparably little regard for those we must now recognize as their victims.

The Monroe Doctrine - Then and Now

 

The Monroe Doctrine, about which everyone of my generation learned in grade school history class, but which may suddenly be news to many people today, was originally a U.S. foreign policy statement warning European powers against any further colonization or attempts at recolonization in the Americas, effectively establishing the Western Hemisphere as a U.S. sphere of influence, while correspondingly committing the U.S. to non-interference in European affairs. Although largely the work of his Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, President James Monroe formally articulated the doctrine during his annual State of the Union Address to Congress on December 2, 1823. By then, nearly all of the formerly Spanish colonies in the the Americas had achieved independence. Monroe effectively divided the Old and the New Worlds into separate spheres of influence, and clarified that further efforts by European powers (e.g. the Holy Alliance) to regain imperial control of or influence over the newly independent  states in the region would be viewed as a threat to U.S. security. In turn, the United States would continue to recognize and not interfere with existing European colonies, nor would it meddle in the internal affairs of European countries (their sphere of influence).

“The occasion has been judged proper for asserting, as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers. …

 

“We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power, we have not interfered and shall not interfere. But with the Governments who have declared their independence and maintained it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States”

In actual practice, the U.S. lacked both a credible army and navy at the time of the doctrine's proclamation, and its enforcement depended upon the cooperation of the United Kingdom whose Royal Navy controlled the Atlantic and which shared the U.S. interest in keeping the continental powers from regaining significant influence in the Western hemisphere. Obviously, over tine the balance of power has shifted, and the United States has long enjoyed the ability to enforce its interpretation the Monroe Doctrine - opposing, for example, Maximilian's Hapsburg Empire in Mexico in the 1860s and the basing of Soviet offensive missiles in Cuba in 1962.

The so-called "Roosevelt Corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine, articulated by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1904, expanded the claimed right to intervene in internal regional politics, ostensibly to prevent foreign intervention by guaranteeing domestic stability in regional states and their ability to repay foreign creditors. This justified famous military interventions in Cuba and Haiti. In 1934, FDR's "Good Neighbor Policy" was seen at least in part as superseding his predecessor's corollary.

Now the Monroe Doctrine is in the news again. After an 80-year, post-World War II interval, in which the United States dominated the globe and established a network of alliances and rules to attempt to guarantee a world order of relative peace and security, the U.S. seems to be withdrawing from that role in favor of a return to the historically more typical, pre-World War II order. One image that has been mooted about is a world of three spheres of interest - China in Asia and the Pacific, Russia in Europe, and the United States in the Western hemisphere. Of course, Russia is really a decadent petro-state and can only assert imperial pretensions in Europe as a direct result of U.S. withdrawal from Europe. (Remember that the original post-war European goal, as reflected eventually in NATO, was to keep "Germany down Russia out, and America in.")

That the U.S. is the primary and dominant power in the American hemisphere is obvious. That is has an interest in keeping other world powers (e.g., China) from increasing influence in the Americas is likewise reasonably obvious. That it needs to do so by directly interfering militarily in the internal politics of Latin American states is much less evident and seems more likely to be counter-productive in the long run - not least because of the contemporary resurgence of isolationist sentiment in the U.S. and the American voters' allergy to foreign military commitments that risk American lives. That to maintain its sphere of influence in the American hemisphere, the U.S. would do well to abandon its post-World War II alliances and commitments and allow, for example, Russia to rebuild the Tsarist Empire by reconquering Ukraine seems both morally wrong and strategically short-sighted.

But what about Greenland? When Germany occupied Denmark in 1940, the U.S. rightly regarded Greenland as Western hemisphere territory which should not be allowed to fall from Danish to German control. One year later, on April 9, 1941, the U.S. - still officially neutral in the war -  authorized sending U.S. troops to occupy Greenland. The next day, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution officially reaffirming the Monroe Doctrine. After the war, the U.S. returned Greenland to Denmark in 1945, but the U.S. maintained military presence through treaties, while Denmark rejected U.S. suggestions that it purchase the territory. Greenland may indeed remain a vital security interest of the U.S. in the Arctic region, but anything the U.S. actually needs in terms of fostering hemispheric security in the Arctic it already has access to through its bases in Greenland and its treaties with Denmark. An attempt to conquer Greenland by force from Denmark would contravene the Monroe Doctrine's own recognition of existing European interests in the hemisphere, as well as effectively destroying NATO.

I was foreseeing none of this on the Monroe Doctrine's 200th anniversary, when I wrote, "the 'Monroe Doctrine,' like so much of our inherited legacy from the very different world of the founding era, seems to remain in dubious reserve for whatever ambiguous ends it may yet be employed."

Photo: President James Monroe White House portrait.

As the Holy Door Closes

 

In his Urbi et Orbi Address on Christmas, Pope Leo referenced today's solemn closing of the Jubilee Year's last Holy Door.

In a few days’ time, the Jubilee Year will come to an end. The Holy Doors will close, but Christ our hope remains with us always! He is the Door that is always open, leading us into divine life. This is the joyful proclamation of this day: the Child who was born is God made man; he comes not to condemn but to save; his is not a fleeting appearance, for he comes to stay and to give himself. In him, every wound is healed and every heart finds rest and peace.  “The Lord’s birth is the birth of peace.”

Closing a door obviously lacks the symbolic religious resonance of its opening a year earlier. Opening the Holy Door expressed an invitation - literally an invitation to come to Rome on pilgrimage, figuratively a challenge to undertake a spiritual journey in hope. In contrast, closing the door seems almost somewhat sad. Fittingly it falls on Epiphany, which marks the end of Christmas, after which we will soon dismantle the decorations that have brightened this season and so set it apart from the drab rest of the year. I am always saddened to see the Christmas Tree stripped of its ornaments and thrown out into the street. Yet, as the Christmas Tree disappears, I also know that it is time to start a new year and get on with the important business of living Christmas daily in an undecorated and drab world.

So too, the closing of the Holy Door invites us to renew the world on this side of that Door.

In his Homily for the Epiphany, at the Mass which immediately followed the closing of the Jubilee Door, Pope Leo said, all of our lives are a journey. The Gospel challenges the Church not to be afraid of this phenomenon, but to appreciate it, and orient it toward God who sustains us. He is a God who can unsettle us because he does not remain firmly in our hands like the idols of silver and gold; instead, he is alive and life-giving, like the Baby whom Mary cradled in her arms and whom the wise men adored. Holy places like cathedrals, basilicas and shrines, which have become Jubilee pilgrimage destinations, must diffuse the aroma of life, the unforgettable realization that another world has begun.

It is that another world that has begun that we now are privileged to inhabit even on this side of the Door, even now in this sad saeculum, even now in this troubled year of our Lord 2026.

Journey of the Magi

 

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times when we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities dirty and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wineskins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

(T.S. Eliot, Journey of the Magi, 1927, Collected Poems 1909-1962, Harcourt, 1963).

When Eliot wrote his famous poem, the magi all still arrived on the same day every year. Now, thanks to the late 20th-century liturgical calendar reforms, they come early in the U.S. - this year two days early. That also means we get only 10 "Days of Christmas" this Year, hence no "11 Ladies Dancing" and no "12 Lords a Leaping" this year, at least in the U.S.).

I don't know how cold it really was for the magi. Eliot calls it the very dead of winter. Whatever it may have been there and then, it certainly has been a cold coming for them this year. Eliot's poem portrayed a cold world not just in weather, but a cold-hearted world, which certainly is what the magi would be encountering in their journey this year.

Of course, we know next to nothing about the actual magi, the ones Matthew's Gospel tells us about. We have counted them as three because of the number of their gifts, and crowned them as kings because of the resonance of Psalm 72. From the title Matthew gives them we can assume they were wise. From their behavior, we infer that they were seekers - not New Age dilettantes but genuine seekers searching for life-changing truth, which indeed they found not in Herod's palace but in a much less unexpected place a short distance away. Bethlehem was just a few miles away, but it might as well have been a world away not just for the power politicians at Herod's court but for the religious and cultural elite. They were the academic intellectuals of their time, learned scholars who completely missed the point of their learning. They correctly discerned the place to go, but unlike the true seekers, the magi, they stayed home, clinging to the comforts of the status quo.

Matthew tells us that when the star reappeared, the magi were overjoyed. The politicians stayed put, as did the intellectuals, but the truly wise went forward, following the star and finding what they sought. The magi set out as true pilgrims – and on entering the house they saw the child with Mary his mother … prostrated themselves and did him homage. In the old liturgy, when these words were read or sung in the Gospel on Epiphany, everyone was directed to genuflect. It was the liturgy’s dramatic way of physically bringing the point of the story home, helping us to identify personally with the pilgrim magi, experiencing what they experienced. Our overly wordy and ritually impoverished contemporary worship deprives us of that direct physical identification with the experience of the magi. We must work extra hard to get where our ancestors arrived naturally, kneeling in homage in the presence of life-changing truth.

After Epiphany, like the magi, we too must return to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation.

A New Year; A New Mayor

Happy New Year! 

"It is the common custom in meeting of friends at this season, to greet each other with a Happy New Year! This is a praiseworthy and pleasant custom, and in accordance with it, I greet you all, my dear brethren, with a Happy New Year! Happy New Year to all our friends and the inhabitants of this city, and to all our countrymen, whether dwelling north or south, east or west, in this our native land. Happy New year to all men of whatever race or clime; for God is our common Creator, and in Christ we are all sons of God, and therefore brethren." (Servant of God Isaac Hecker, Sermon How To Be Happy, January 1, 1863).

And, speaking of "this city," with this new year comes a new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, New York City's 111th mayor since Thomas Willett first bore the title after the office was established in 1665. Things were a lot different then. Willett was appointed by the British colonial governor. Mamdani attracted 140,000 volunteers to his campaign and was elected by a majority of the city's voters. Mamdani is also the first South-Asian and the first Muslim to be elected New York City's Mayor. 

After the overthrow of the Orleanist monarchy and subsequent unexpected events in mid-19th-century France, Karl Marx famously wrote, "all France has been surprised by Paris." Perhaps, with Mamdani's election, it can likewise been said that the United States has been surprised by New York. Whatever else his election many portend, it has highlighted the widespread and deep dissatisfaction with neoliberal oligarchy (what AOC at Mayor Mamdani's Inauguration called "the barbarism of extreme income inequality") and a general desire for something better, for a city that fulfills the promise of a more flourishing life for its citizens.

It was little over a year ago that Mamdani was barely even noticed at the 2024 San Juan Somos conference. "I was blending into the walls," was how he described it to New York Magazine's David Freedlander. That he is now mayor reflects the amazing intersection of  personal political talents and the exigencies of this challenging moment in our history. (Something similar happened nationally in the 20th century when FDR's and LBJ's unique personal political talents intersected with the unique opportunities presented by the 1930s and the 1960s. It was FDR who famously said "the country demands bold, persistent experimentation.")

There are and will be many obstacles to any mayor's achieving his objectives. At best, local politics is about choosing which scarce resources will be allocated among which competing constituencies, and so which constituencies must settle for less than they want. But politics-as-usual has a way of narrowing the very possibilities of politics. As Mamdani himself has acknowledged to Freedlander, "the longer you spend in politics, the less possible you think things are in politics." Perhaps the biggest challenge to any newcomer to our rigid and sclerotic governance is to convince the relevant political constituencies that things actually can be accomplished, that changes actually can occur. 

Fittingly, in his inaugural address promising an agenda of :safety, affordability, and abundance," Mayor Mamdani said, "the only expectation I seek to reset is that of small expectations.

Photo: Senator Bernie Sanders administers the mayoral oath of office to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, City Hall, January 1, 2026.