Mother and Son - Saints for the Ages

 

Tomorrow, on the anniversary of his death, the Church will commemorate one of its greatest saints and Doctors of the Church, Saint Augustine (354-430). Today, as if in anticipation, the contemporary calendar commemorates Augustine's mother, Saint Monica (331-387), thus connecting their veneration as saints, as they were so closely united in life. (The exact date of Monica's death in 387 is unknown. For many centuries, prior to the adoption of the contemporary calendar, Monica was commemorated on May 4.)

One of the highlights of Augustinian Pope Leo XIV's recent visit to Algeria was his pilgrimage to Annaba, where he celebrated Mass in the 19th-century French colonial Basilica of Saint Augustine, which overlooks the archeological site of Hippo Regius, the coastal city where Augustine served as Bishop, lived in community, preached, and wrote, from 396 until his death during the Vandal invasion of Roman North Africa. (The Roman province of Africa corresponded to the territory south of the Mediterranean, north of the Sahara, and west of Egypt, i.e, much of modern Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco). 

Monica never made it with Augustine to Hippo. After a famous conversation, which Augustine describes in Book 9 of his Confessions, Monica died at Ostia in Italy. Augustine, his son Adeotatus, and others (among them Augustine's lifelong friend Alypius) were all there en route back home to Africa after their baptism by Saint Ambrose in Milan at Easter, April 24-25, 387. The connection with Monica highlights Augustine's spiritual journey prior to his later ministry as bishop, and it reminds us that Augustine's "conversion" was really his return - and full adult commitment - to the religion of his childhood, the religion of his mother.

The transition from Augustine as spiritual wanderer to Augustine as committed man of the Church also marked the culmination of Monica's presence in his life, her role having been completed as she herself acknowledged. Thus, in that last conversation, Monica said to her son, "I did have one reason for wanting to live a little longer: to see you become a Catholic Christian before I died. God has lavished his gifts on me in that respect, for I know that you have even renounced earthly happiness to become his servant" (Confessions, 9:10). Saint Monica is thus rightly remembered in the Church as a model of virtuous motherhood and persevering prayer. 

Augustine had been the product of a religiously and culturally "mixed marriage." That "mixed marriage" represented the two different directions then still actually available to Augustine  - the old Roman civic tradition that represented the best of the past and was coming to an end, and the new tradition of Christian faith that represented hope in the future. In Augustine's personal experience, his pagan father, Patricius, personified the former, and Monica the latter. Monica, moreover, didn't just represent residual impressions from Augustine's childhood religious experience. She served as a bridge connecting those impressions (and that childhood experience) with his active adult re-immersion in the public life of his time in the context of his increasing involvement in the communal life of the Church. 

As Paul Tillich pointed out, in A History of Christian Thought, Monica's influence on Augustine meant the influence of Christian tradition. Tillich compared Augustine with Plato, who had written out of the tradition of the Athenian gentry to which he belonged, but which was coming to an end, whereas with Augustine the tradition was new. Thus, Karl Adam, in Saint Augustine: the Odyssey of his Soul, described Augustine's youthful religious conflicts as a fight against the Church already in his heart.

The relationship between Monica and Augustine illustrates the importance in life of what a social scientist might call primary socialization. Having sampled everything late Roman antiquity had to offer in terms of intellectual and spiritual options, Augustine in the end returned to the faith of his childhood, to which he had long before been introduced by his mother. 

Infatuated as we moderns erroneously are with individual autonomy, we are more likely to emphasize how we grow and change physically, intellectually, and spiritually, and how we keep growing and changing throughout our lives. Yet what we learn and experience as children - in the family and in our early social surroundings - may be what sticks with us most in both acknowledged and unacknowledged ways. How we are formed in the home may have more to do with who we are and what we become and how we turn out than almost anything else that happens later. Augustine's effusive tribute to his mother, Monica, highlights how important such socialization is and how essential it is for society (and the Church community) to nurture that.

Max Weber, in The Sociology of Religion, once observed that no religion ever resulted from intellectuals' chatter. Saint Monica's role in Augustine's transformation substituted for what was religiously defective amid the admitted attractions of philosophy. She represented the alternative Augustine found in the authentic piety of the faith community. (Hence the symbolic appropriateness  of Monica's role in Augustine's early dialogue De beata vita, IV, 35, where she invoked Saint Ambrose, who, perhaps more than anyone else in Augustine's experience, personally modeled Christian faith's transformative effect on classical romanitas.) The absence of such traditional familial and communal bonds for so many in our society makes one wonder how something resembling Augustine's "conversion" can occur in a world unmoored from the hold of tradition and popular piety, and what, if anything, can take their place.

Meanwhile, Monica's famous son still stands out as one of the most towering figures from the Church's history and one of those ancient figures who still speaks directly to today. Augustine's spiritual journey was also an intellectual and cultural one, in that he grappled with the leading ideas of his time both in philosophy and in heretical forms of Christianity. How equipped are we today to do that? Or are we tempted instead to hide from this challenge?

As Bishop of Hippo, Augustine ended up as a leading figure in the somewhat self-enclosed province of Roman North Africa. Augustine's youthful spiritual journey had led him to attempt a heroic break from the world, but then the Church pulled him back even deeper into engagement with the Roman and African world. As H.W. Coates, who credits the great Augustine biographer Peter Brown for having "pulled Augustine out of modern Protestant abstractions and put him back in the complicated Roman world he actually inhabited," has emphasized, "Augustine does not stand outside the ancient world looking backward at it. He belongs to it."

Within that ancient Roman and African world, Augustine experienced the historical process in which the Catholic Church became the established Church of Latin Western civilization, powerful in practice as well as in theory. Meanwhile, thanks to the pressure of unexpected historical events, Augustine articulated a Christian philosophy of history, which challenged and broke with what was then the conventional wisdom, what we might call "Roman imperial exceptionalism," thereby definitively demystifying politics for Christian theology and spirituality. How have we fully appreciated and appropriated that important lesson in the face of the moral threat today of a certain sort of renewed Catholic "integralism" and the perennial problem of American religious "exceptionalism"? These characteristics of the transitional time in which Saint Augustine lived and in which he became one of the Church's dominant voices have a lot in common with our contemporary era in ways most other historical periods do not and hence provide ample opportunities for renewed reflection.

Augustine is rightly remembered as the Doctor gratiae ("Doctor of Grace"), because of his emphasis on our fundamental need for God's gratuitous grace - in opposition to the heresy of Pelagius. He could also be called a Doctor of Unity because of his tireless advocacy of the unity of the Church against the schismatic Donatist church. This aspect of Augustine's pastoral ministry particularly resonates with the challenges facing today's politically polarized and fractured Church and world, in which the Gospel is increasingly overshadowed and disfigured by partisan identifications.

Saint Augustine also wrote a Rule, which has historically been adopted and adapted as a basis for the common life of many Catholic religious communities. After his return to Africa, Augustine created his first quasi-religious community in his hometown of Tagaste (Souk Ahras, Algeria) in 388, only a year after his baptism. He did the same in Hippo in 391 after his relocation there as a presbyter. Then a few years later, after being ordained bishop, he set up a similar community for fellow clergy in his house. There, around 397, he wrote the Rule that bears his name. This relatively short, biblically based text, reflecting some of the earliest experiences of cenobitic religious life in the Latin Church, was inspired by Luke's image of the Jerusalem community in Acts.

According to a famous 8th-9th-century legend (attested to by Hincmar of Reims), after Augustine's baptism Ambrose and his new neophyte spontaneously composed and sang alternate verses of what became the Church's great hymn of Thanksgiving, the Te Deum. While there may be no historical basis for this legend, if one were ever to pick an event which called for a Te Deum to be sung in thanksgiving, surely Saint Augustine's return to his childhood religion at that pivotal point in the history of the Latin Church would be on the short list of finalists! And, thanks to his own account in his justly famous Confessions, Monica and Augustine's story is one of the best known and most influential in the history of the Church and in Western literature.

So much of our appreciation of Monica and Augustine - a mother and her son, both Roman African Christians and saints for the ages - is flavored by Augustine's monumental work of self-exploration, his Confessions, which broke new ground in the ancient art of biography and still speaks to us about how a person's past experiences remain an active aspect of one's present personality. In his own late-life Retractationes, Augustine spoke of his "Thirteen books of my Confessions, which praise the just and good God in all my evil and good ways, and stir up towards him men's mind and feelings," which, "had this effect on me when I wrote them, and they still do this, when I now read them." 

May they continue to have such effects in us today!

Image: "St. Augustine's Vision and the Death of Monica," painted by well-known Renaissance artist Benozzo Gozzoli (1420-1497),  based on his reading of Augustine's Confessions. This is one of several such frescoes in the Church of Saint Augustine, in San Gimignano, Italy. After his baptism at Easter 387, Augustine and Monica went to Rome's port city of Ostia to prepare for their journey back to Africa. There Monica became ill. In the center of the fresco, is Monica on her deathbed, with Augustine standing by her side. Augustione's friend Alypius is also there.  The fresco alos portrayse Monica and Augustine looking out over the garden, an event recounted in the Confessions, just before Monica's illness. There is also a ship, taking Augustine and Alypius back to Africa. A woman with some children in the foreground represent the local Christians in Ostia, who comforted Augustine. 

45 Years in Religious Life

 

Forty-five years ago, I entered the Paulist Fathers' Novitiate, then located at Mount Paul, Oak Ridge, NJ, on some 1100 or so acres of rocks and trees (and a lake) in a beautiful, then still semi-rural locale in northern New Jersey, some 50 or so miles from New York city on the way to the Delaware Water Gap. Sadly, like so much of what was once American Catholic religious life, that novitiate is gone, but the incomparable experience of that year remains alive in my memory and enshrined in my heart.

Religious Life has taken many forms throughout the Church's history, but it has from its origin been an important, even integral part of the Church's life. The American Catholic Church I grew up in would not have been possible - or even imaginable - without the country's wide network of Catholic schools and the Religious Sisters who staffed them. The ubiquity of Religious Life throughout the Church's history was recognized by the Second Vatican Council in 1965. According to Perfectae Caritatis, 1:

Indeed from the very beginning of the Church men and women have set about following Christ with greater freedom and imitating Him more closely through the practice of the evangelical counsels, each in his own way leading a life dedicated to God. Many of them, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, lived as hermits or founded religious families, which the Church gladly welcomed and approved by her authority. So it is that in accordance with the Divine Plan a wonderful variety of religious communities has grown up which has made it easier for the Church not only to be equipped for every good work (cf. 2 Timothy 3:17) and ready for the work of the ministry-the building up of the Body of Christ (cf. Ephesians 4:12)-but also to appear adorned with the various gifts of her children like a spouse adorned for her husband (cf. Revelation 21:2) and for the manifold Wisdom of God to be revealed through her (cf. Ephesians 3:10).

Thus far, the theory. The practice, of course, is inevitably somewhat more complicated, for the obvious reason that religious life is about calling very ordinary people to do something somewhat surprising and extraordinary, while remaining their ordinary selves, equipped - for the most part - with still very ordinary means.

Such were the eight of us who assembled on that August afternoon 45 years ago, a very diverse group united only by our still dimly appreciated perception of a common calling. Of those eight, four of us were eventually ordained priests. Three of us four are still alive and active in ministry, but only I (perhaps the one once least likely to succeed) am still in religious life. Such are the strange ways of Providence!

Servant of God Isaac Hecker's vocational journey also had its ups and downs. He came to believe that "Divine Providence had led [him] as it were by the hand, through the different ways of error," to discern his vocation. His formation too was a baffling period of "abasement and helplessness," leading eventually to "great consolation" in the "duties of the sacred ministry." He too experienced severe setbacks, "the source of the deepest affliction" [Narrative of His Life," Rome 1858]. Through it all, he found in religious life meaning, purpose, and fulfillment - as have so many others before and since, myself included. His advice to his fellow Religious remains as relevant now as then: "Let us be thankful to God, humble towards each other and everyone else, and more than ever in earnest to do the work God demands at our hands" [Letter to the American Fathers, Rome, March 11, 1858]. 

Photo: Former Mount Paul Novitiate, Oak Ridge, NJ. 

"You Are Christ ... You Are Peter"

 

 

I had just finished my physical therapy session on May 8, 2025, when one of the therapists asked, “So, will this be the day you get your new boss? Who do you predict it will be?” I answered that I had no idea, that the only thing one could say for sure was that the new pope would certainly not be an American. In just a couple of hours, I was again rightly reminded me that I, at least, am not infallible!

Speaking of popes, past as well as present, among the many wonderful things which one can watch on YouTube is a series of videos from the Italian TV coverage of the coronation of Pope Saint John XXIII on November 4, 1958. (TV was still very new then, and that showed in the utterly unself-conscious way the ceremony unfolded and how Italian TV showed it. Unlike then, today it would all be carefully choreographed. Everyone on screen would appear exactly where he is supposed to be, when and only when he is supposed to be there, doing just what he is supposed to do, with nobody else in the TV frame.)

 

Several times during that ancient ceremony, the Choir chanted Jesus’ words we just heard in today’s Gospel [Matthew 16:13-20]: Tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam (“You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church”).  The full Gospel was also chanted, not once but twice – first by a Latin deacon, and then by a Greek deacon. Repetition is basically one way we say: Hey, pay attention. This is important!

 

Today’s Gospel takes us back in time - from the baroque splendor of Saint Peter’s Basilica and the modern papacy to Peter himself and the region of Caesarea Philippi. Some 20 miles north of the Sea of Galilee, Caesarea Philippi was in territory ruled by King Herod’s son Philip - hence its name. It is now known as "Banias," a deformation of its pre-Roman name, referring to the Greek god Pan. In Jesus’ time, there was a pagan temple to Pan at this location at Israel’s northern border at the foot of Mount Hermon.

That border was a lot more peaceful and easier to cross then than now; but it was still a border of sorts, laden with symbolic spiritual significance. Not only was it a Gentile place, but it was also a place probably previously a focus of pre-Israelite Canaanite worship.

 

It was to that faraway, somewhat pagan place that Jesus took his disciples to ask them the basic Christian question: Who do you say that Jesus is? As befits the prominent role he was being prepared for, Peter answered on behalf of the disciples – on behalf of the entire Church: You are the Christ [that is to say, the Messiah, the Anointed One], the Son of the living God. Not only does Peter proclaim that Jesus is Israel’s hoped-for Messiah, but – in that site sacred to Pan, the son of Zeus – he proclaims Jesus as the Son of the living (that is, the one, only true) God.

 

Now as then, Peter speaks for the Church – not just for his fellow apostles, but for all of us. In response, Jesus assures us that Peter’s profession of faith was not some mere human opinion, one option among many in the global religious marketplace, but a revelation from God – one which Peter himself, at that stage, still at best only poorly understood. (Hence, the temporary prohibition on telling anyone.) From such a modest beginning in such an oddly out-of-the-way place, Peter’s profession of who Jesus is, has been the center of the Church’s proclamation – as Peter’s role has since likewise remained central to the Church’s identity and mission.

 

Fast forward to the baroque basilica built above Peter’s tomb, where, for centuries since, Peter has continued to speak - on behalf of the Church for the sake of the whole world. In a Church that right now, as so often in her past, seems sometimes more divided than united, the papal office (and, in our modern media age, the person of the Pope himself) continue to serve as the visible source of the Church’s unity across space and time. Across space, “people of every nation, culture, and tongue” (as we say in the Eucharistic Prayer) are “gathered as one,” so that “in a world torn by strife and discord,” a Universal Church “may stand forth as a sign of oneness and peace.”

Such a unity across space is, in turn, uniquely possible because of the Church’s unity across time - our unity with Peter in his profession of faith in the Christ, the Son of the living God, whose own victory over death has definitively guaranteed that the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against the Church.

 

The activities of the papacy have changed over the centuries. When I was growing up in the 1950s, no one would have imagined that popes would travel all over the world, which has now become a routine expectation. Nowadays, much papal teaching takes place personally in homilies and General Audiences and, more formally, in encyclical letters addressed to the entire world. One of the most famous papal letters was that of Pope Leo the Great to the Council of Chalcedon in 451, outlining the relationship between the divine and human natures of Christ, to which the assembled bishops supposedly responded: “Peter has spoken to us through Leo.” The external activities of popes change with times and circumstances, all as expressions of the pope’s ministry as the visible source of the Church’s unity across space and time. Our unity across time in professing the ancient apostolic faith of Peter, makes possible our present unity across space as Christ’s Church in our world, which in turn fosters – for both the Church and the world - our future hope for both space and time in the kingdom of heaven. Meanwhile, in our time and place, Peter continues to speak through Leo!

 

Homily for the 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, August 23, 2026.

Photo: Statue of Saint Peter, Saint Peter's Basilica, Rome.

No War, No Peace

 

Historically, the slogan "No War, No Peace" refers back to Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), the Bolshevik leader of the Soviet negotiating team, trying at Breat-Litovsk in early 1918 to end the war with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Refusing to accede to Imperial Germany's severe territorial demands, Trotsky simply announced on February 10, 1918, that the Russian war was over and that the Soviets would cease active fighting. Trotsky's Bolshevik boss, Vladimir Lenin, initially went along with the "No War, No Peace" approach. After Germany resumed its military advance, however, Lenin pragmatically insisted that the Russian negotiators immediately agree to sign the treaty accepting Germany's harsh terms. So much for "No War, No Peace" as a strategic policy!

It is a very imperfect analogy, of course, but "No War, No Peace" is not an altogether inadequate description of the present impasse in the misbegotten war between the U.S. and Iran. Whatever the slogan's strategic limitations, Trotsky's "No War, No Peace" was at least a  policy of sorts. On the other hand, it is hard - on any given day - to divine what U.S. policy regarding Iran actually is, or indeed what the state of the conflict actually is. Are we negotiating? If so, with whom? Are we threatening "prompt and utter destruction" (as the world War II allies famously threatened Japan at Potsdam)? If so, with whom? Are we doing both at the same time? Or something else? Who knows? How would one know? 

Like so much of what the U.S. has done (or failed to do) in this war, Trotsky's "No War, No Peace" was an ad hoc adjustment to an uncontrollable reality. In fairness to Trotsky, however, the war was not one which the Bolsheviks had started, although, of course, they had benefited enormously from its traumatic effects on Russia. The Revolution had inherited the war from the Tsarist Regime, which shared responsibility for that colossal failure of European civilization with the other belligerent Powers on both sides. In contrast, the Iran War is entirely the result of U.S. decisions, a wholly self-induced foreign-policy debacle.

According to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan's Regime Change (Simon and Schuster, 2026), the Administration's previous attack on Iran - the June 2025 "Operation Midnight Hammer" - began with Mass offered in the Vice President's office, attended by the Secretary of State and the White House Chief of Staff, who later said it was "to pray for the people." One wonders whether any comparable prayers were offered the following February when the current war was being launched?

All of which, of course, brings us back to the original mistake, the misbegotten character of the conflict, displayed in the problematic decision-making recently described so poignantly, for example, in Haberman and Swan's same riveting account and which continues to bedevil the U.S. today. It is widely alleged that the Administration would like just to be able to quit the war somehow. One is reminded of October 1966, when Senator George Aiken of Vermont famously suggested that the United States should just unilaterally declare that it had won the Vietnam War, using this "victory" as an excuse to de-escalate American involvement in Vietnam. But unilaterally declaring "victory," would not open the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranians just don't seem to want to cooperate with American face-saving - unsurprisingly, given their long history of malevolent anti-Americanism and their past success at humiliating American presidents. Meanwhile, the war continues to take a terrible toll on the world economy, on American military resources, and on our on-site personnel (as evidenced by the recent revelations about conditions on the American aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, which themselves highlight the defective nature of American war planning). 

Perhaps, prayers really are what the situation calls for. But divine intervention to bail us out - what the ancients called a Deus ex machina -  cannot be counted on. At the end of The Odyssey (Homer's, not Nolan's modernized version), when Odysseus and his rivals seemed stuck in a pattern of further fighting that threatened almost unending civil conflict in Ithaka, Athena herself intervened. She "cried with her clarion voice and forced the whole host to stop," and Zeus reinforced her intervention with a decisive thunderbolt. Odysseus "obeyed, his heart rejoicing. They were made to swear oaths to each other, to endure for all time to come" (tr. Daniel Mandelsohn, U. of Chicago Pr., 2025, 530, 545-546).

Would a clarion call to "Stop," backed by a thunderbolt or two make a difference in this war? Actually, one might suggest that more than a few such thunderbolts have metaphorically already been hurled as warnings both before and during this conflict, to little or no avail. So, on it goes, "No War, No peace." 

Photo: Leon Trotsky and his fellow Bolshevik negotiators arriving and meeting their German counterparts at Brest-Litovsk station on January 15, 1918.

Blessed Be Her Glorious Assumption - Even on Saturday

 

"To day is the holy day of the Assumption of the dear blessed Mary other of our Lord and Saviour Jesus. Oh may I be found worthy of her regard and love." So wrote the then 24-year old Servant of God Isaac Thomas Hecker in his Diary on August 15, 1844, exactly two weeks after his entry into the Catholic Church.

La Madonna di mezz'agosto was how my Sicilian grandmother used to refer to today's festival of the Assumption (typically termed, as in the Divine Praises, the "Glorious" Assumption) of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which has been celebrated on this same date for so many centuries.

Unfortunately, in the United States this year, because it falls on a Saturday, the Assumption is not being kept as a holy day of obligation, for reasons which may seem inexplicable at best and (like so many other contemporary religious mistakes) may also seem self-destructive in terms of the Church's visible and public presence in people's lives today.

In contrast, early on in American history the Assumption received special attention and solemnity in the newly created the United States as the patronal feast of Baltimore, the first U.S. diocese (then encompassing the entire territory of the new country). In his first pastoral letter to his extensive American diocese, Bishop John Carroll called on all U.S. Catholics to celebrate the feast: "to unite with one heart, and in one earnest supplication to the father of all mercies, and the giver of every good gift, through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, that he may be graciously pleased to preserve, increase, and diffuse a sincere and well-grounded attachment to the principles of our holy religion; to advert from us the seduction of error and pestilential infidelity; to awaken and renew in us the spirit of solid piety, and of watchfulness over your unruly passions; to animate us to the fulfilling of all the commandments; to pour down on our country blessings spiritual and temporal; and to receive our grateful and humble thanks for the innumerable favors, which we continually receive from a Bountiful Providence." 

Certainly, Saturday or not, that remains a worthy prayer agenda for this happy feast in our own troubled time as well!

Early traditions saw Mary's death (her "Dormition") as an extraordinary event. It is thought that traditions about Mary's Dormition and her accompanying Assumption can be traced as far back as the second century. Whatever may be inferred from those ancient narratives, Eastern Orthodox Christians affirm that, after Mary had died a natural death, her final resurrection was anticipated and she was carried completely, body as well as soul, into the glory of heaven. Accordingly, they celebrate the Dormition of Theotokos on August 15, preceded by a strict 14-day fast. Roman Catholics regrettably abandoned virtually all remnants of the ancient ascetic Christian practice of fasting decades ago.  That said,  we likewise also affirm faith in Mary's body-and-soul assumption and also celebrate it on this same ancient date. (Catholic teaching, now formally dogmatically defined by Pope Pius XII in 1950, leaves it an open question whether Mary actually died and was then raised up to heaven or whether she was directly assumed into heaven without having died first.)

In 1946, Pope Pius XII, in a letter to the world's bishops Deiparae Virginis Mariae, asked them:

"Do you, venerable brethren, in your outstanding wisdom and prudence, judge that the bodily Assumption of the Blessed Virgin can be proposed and defined as a dogma of faith? Do you, with your clergy and people, desire it?" To this inquiry, the Pope received an unsurprisingly resounding response, which he characterized as "outstanding agreement of the Catholic prelates and the faithful." This showed, the Pope claimed, "the concordant teaching of the Church's ordinary doctrinal authority and the concordant faith of the Christian people which the same doctrinal authority sustains and directs" (Munificentissimus Deus, 12). 

Those were the days! Try to imagine such concordance in today's conflict-ridden factionalized world! Try to reimagine today the missionary self-confidence and future-oriented hopefulness expressed in that Holy Year of 1950 in the papal bull defining the by-then fully accepted Catholic doctrine!

Preaching at the Sixth National Marian Congress of France in July 1950, the Papal Nuncio to France, Archbishop Angelo Roncalli (the future Pope Saint John XXIII) composed this prayer:

O Mary, Mother of Jesus and our Mother too! We hail you with this cry that all generations repeat, contemplating the mysteries of your life and the splendor of your Assumption. Once more we hail you as blessed, beata; intercede for us, O glorious Queen of the world and be ever mindful of us, particularly in the dangers and needs of the present hour.

Photo: The Crowning of Mary, Queen of Heaven, Mural by Willian Lauren Harris, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY.

To watch a video (with commentary in french) of the proclamation fo the assumption by Pope Pius XII in 1950, go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AKESyTZZM8.

Theo - A Kris Kringle for our Dispirited Age

 

Every Christmastime, I rewatch Miracle on 34th Street. Originally, however, that famous film was released in summer and was not initially presented as a Christmas movie. To me, how a film that features Santa Claus could not be a Christmas movie defies all explanation! That said, Santa Claus aside, Miracle on 34th Street is a movie about how someone who personifies goodness brings joy to other people's lives and gets them to do good things that they probably ought to have had enough sense to do on their own, but never would have. Theo of Golden by Allen Levi (Atria Books, 2025) has a similar feel (minus the Christmas context), highlighting classically human themes of friendship and kindness, mutual service, and responding to the sadness and loneliness so endemic in modern American life.

Allen Levi originally self-published his novel through Amazon in the fall of 2023, but the book really took off in 2025 and has since became a huge success, finding its way onto the New York Times "Bestsellers" list for weeks. The story follows "Theo" - an 86-year-old Portuguese-born man, who uses only his first name - through his eventful year as a visitor residing in a Southern Georgia town called Golden. Theo focuses much of the year buying up portraits of local residents. The portraits had been done by a local artist named Asher. Theo sees them hanging on display (and for sale) in a local coffee shop called The Chalice. Theo's plan in purchasing the portraits himself is to give them as gifts to their subjects. First, Theo sends the portrait’s subjects a handwritten letter on fine paper, inviting them to come to the prearranged meeting place, promising that he’s “a harmless old man, a widower, a father, a toothless lion with only innocent intentions.” For the most part, the recipients of the portraits and the other locals whom Theo befriends respond positively to his generosity and prove to be grateful for an opportunity to tell Theo their story.

Much of the novel is about the unique network of generosity and mutual friendship which Theo creates, and how most of the others in downtown Golden respond to his initiatives. The author supposedly turned down offers from a Christian publisher for Theo of Golden. Even so, this is a novel permeated with a Christian sensibility, with occasional references to both Christian beliefs (e.g. heaven) and practices (e.g. Sunday churchgoing).  The novel’s conclusion features a Christian funeral service that includes an edifying homily on the story of the Risen Christ's encounter with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. (Since Theo is Portuguese his religious background would presumably have been Catholic. The local church, however, although the minister is a Father Lundy, looks somewhat generically, non-denominationally Christian.)

If the novel has a particular weakness, it is that the conclusion which ties everyone and everything together appears a bit too contrived, which (to my mind) may actually diminish the gratuity of Theo's kindness. The book could also have been a little tighter (i.e. shorter), the main point having been made and remade multiple times. (Rare is the book that couldn't benefit from being shorter!) That said, it is a beautiful story that highlights hope for humanity and prioritizes authentic Christian values in this time when such contrary values seem to predominate in our culture and in our politics.

As Father Lunday says: "For a year, he was in our midst and now, looking back, can't we say that, when we were with him, our hearts burned within us, our souls stood on tiptoe, our eyes recognized something good and true, and our minds could believe, if not fully, then ever so slightly, that love and heaven and forgiveness are the most real things that we can know in this world?"

Rome's Third Patron

 

Quam clarificata est Jerosolyma Stephano, tam illustris fieret Roma Laurentio ("As Jerusalem is made glorious by Stephen, so Rome is made illustrious by Lawrence"). So said Saint Leo the Great preaching on today's feast of the great Roman deacon-martyr Lawrence. Back in 2012, during my time at "Saints School" in Rome, I got to visit three Roman churches named for Saint Lawrence - San Lorenzo in Lucina, San Lorenzo in Panisperna (honoring the site of Lawrence's martyrdom), and the great Basilica of Saint Lawrence Outside the Walls, where Lawrence is buried. (The Photo above is of the altar at the site of his burial).

 

Christian Rome produced many martyrs - among them Pope Sixtus II and four other Roman deacons, whose memory we commemorated at Mass just last Friday, who were martyred just four days before Lawrence in 258 during the persecution of Emperor Valerian. 

What made Lawrence stand out so?

 

As deacon, Lawrence was apparently in charge of the material possessions of the Roman Church and of its alms for the poor. According to tradition, after the execution of Pope Sixtus the Prefect demanded that Lawrence turn over the Church's treasure. Supposedly, Lawrence quickly distributed as much of the Church's property as possible to the poor and then went to the Prefect and presented to him the poor. "Behold in these poor," Lawrence said to the Prefect, "the treasures I promised to show you." 

In the late 20th century, it became quite common to talk about a "preferential option for the poor." Lawrence lived it. Hence his standout status in 3rd-century Rome - and a good reason why we remember (and hopefully imitate) him even today.

Homily for the feast of Saint Lawrence, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, August 10, 2026.

Pompeii: Out of Time

 

One of the many side-benefits of the popularity of Christoper Nolan's blockbuster movie The Odyssey has been a widespread increase in interest in classics generally. For me personally, it led directly to my discovery of Mary Beard's fascinating and entertaining podcast Instant Classics. And it was on Instant Classics that I learned about Pompeii: Out of Time, a three-part documentary-drama television series recently produced for National Geographic and hosted and executive-produced by British actor (and Cambridge-trained classicist) Tom Hiddleston.

Hiddleston's series sets out to identify residents who might have escaped the disaster. Working with the "Pompeii Survivors Project," Hiddleston cross-references names inscribed on objects and buildings found in Pompeii with names that also appear elsewhere in the Roman world after the eruption (traditionally dated August 24, AD 79). He thus follows the fates of three individuals, who might have had potential to survive: Avianius, a headstrong teenager from a downwardly mobile family currently apprenticed to a bronze smith; Julia Felix, a wealthy businesswoman who owned a bathhouse on her estate; and an otherwise unidentified soldier, possibly a Praetorian Guardsman, whose belongings were recovered at the elite beach resort of Herculaneum several miles from Pompeii and even closer to Vesuvius.

In the first episode, "Tremors," Hiddleston follows some of the early signs from Vesuvius  as earthquakes disrupt the city. He follows Avianius and Julia Felix while he counts down to the beginning of the eruption. A key concept here is Hiddleston's desire to challenge the popular idea that Pompeii was destroyed without any warning, What in fact he examines is the different physical, social, and psychological pressures which contributed to each individual's eventual real-time decision to flee immediately or to delay during the appoximately 30 hours over which the tragedy transpired..

In the second episode, Hiddleston depicts the first four phases of the eruption. We watch as daylight disappears into darkness. (The fifth phase will be the final pyroclastic flows which ultiately buried the two cities intact for centuries.)  Hiddleston highlights the attempted flight from Herculaneum (dramatized as led by the Praetorian Guardsman.) As pyroclastic surges begin, hundreds will die not in Hurculaneum itself but on the beach from which they were trying to flee. He also highlights how Julia Felix tries to maneuver her household and customers away from the disaster.

In the third episode, Hiddleston uncovers possible evidence about the tragic fates of Avianius and Julia Felix, and considers what survival would have meant in practice for Pompeii's residents.

I guess it is a clever technique to bring us along following particular persons, expecting (or at least given initial reasons to hope) that they will survive. However, hoping our characters will survive only leads to disappointment when in the end most don't make it. Of course, it highlights the dramatic pathos of the event, but we already know it was a titanic catastrophe! By tracing the specific stories of particular people, Hiddleston seems to be trying to make that catastrophe come alive and its tragic character so much more personal for us as observers.

One of the three apparently did survive, however. Avianius apparently made it, although his mother did not, facts attested by a subsequent gravestone. For Avianius, survival meant moving on alone in the world. Survival too - for the few who, totally traumatized and now alone, did survive - was also tragic in its own very deep way.

My grandmother grew up in the shadow of Italy's other active volcano, Mount Etna near Catania, Sicily (which is making herself heard again as this is written!). As a child, I remember worrying that a volcano might erupt in the Bronx! There was never any danger of that, of course. But volcanoes continue to endanger our fragile human world - as Vesuvius itself may yet someday do once again! The twin traumas of massive deaths and traumatized survivors may yet continue to haunt our tragedy-burdened world.

The Cure of Ars

 

The year that Saint John Vianney (1786-1859), the famous "Cure of Ars" and patron of parish priests, died, 1859, Charles Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities, his famous novel about the French Revolution, which begins with the familiar sentence, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." Into that turbulent "worst of times," John Vianney was born just three years before the Revolution - a movement which showed a hatred for the Church, the likes of which Europe had not seen since the worst of the Roman Emperors. Churches were desecrated; bishops, priests, and religious were massacred. Young John Vianney received his First Communion in secret, since public celebration of Mass by priests loyal to the Church was illegal.

After Napoleon had restored some semblance of peace between Church and State, 20-year-old John Vianney went to school to study for the priesthood. He failed the seminary admission test, but somehow managed on his second try. Even then, he was such a poor student that his continuance was in question. The Vicar General of the diocese finally asked the seminary rector, "Is Monsieur Vianney good?" The rector replied, "He is a model of goodness." To that, the Vicar General replied: "Let him be ordained. The grace of God will do the rest." Commenting on John Vianney's difficulties as a student, Isaac Hecker (1819-1888), the founder of the Paulist Fathers, saw "the supernatural action of the Holy Spirit at work" in John Vianney's difficulties. Hecker likened himself to John Vianney in how hard he had found his studies for the priesthood. Both John Vianney and Isaac Hecker went on to become exemplary priests - in spite of not quite measuring up to standard seminary standards.

The damage done by the revolutionary "worst of times" was eminently evident in the little village of Ars (population 230), to which John. Vianney was sent as pastor in 1817. His bishop warned him, "There is little love of God in that parish."

As Ars' parish priest, Saint John Vianney (photo) devoted the rest of his life to trying to remedy that devastating description. And, so, in Ars, "the worst of times" eventually became "the best of times." Always aware of his own inadequacies, but obedient to the Church that had called him to be a pastor and devoted to the people committed to his care, he sought to harmonize his own life with the holiness he was called to embody as a priest, instructing his parishioners by the personal witness of his life. "There are no two ways of serving God," he explained. "There is only one: serve him as he desires to be served. Celebrating Mass, he was said to have "gazed upon the Host with immense love." He believed the fervor of a priest depended on the Mass. "My God," he famously said, "how we ought to pity a priest who celebrates as if he were engaged in something routine." By his example, he helped his parishioners to pray. "One need not say much to pray well," he told them. "We know that Jesus is there in the tabernacle: let us open our hearts to him, let us rejoice in his sacred presence, that is the best prayer."

John Vianney is perhaps most famous for his ministry in the confessional. One legacy of "the worst of times" upheaval produced by the Revolution, was widespread indifference to the sacrament of forgiveness. Eventually, however, penitents would be coming to him from all over France, finally making it one of "the best of times" also for the great sacrament of God's mercy. 

Homily for the feast of Saint John Vianney, Saint Paull the Apostle Church, NY, August 4, 2026.