tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15384778810809912852024-03-18T14:19:49.606-04:00City FatherCity Fatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17769559147659492086noreply@blogger.comBlogger2852125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538477881080991285.post-19777092595566771122024-03-18T09:50:00.005-04:002024-03-18T09:54:11.433-04:00Christendom (The Book)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEX_fAziZ8QJFwCTjFQsOt0UKvWAavoQ0C02KIrY_lygnI4VeJdpOUtV71Vqar84qOb9JWvmijs4vj-YqA1rxjUJJmOUck6Oo7aTmtW9GPhH2HAZTMXsqanEi4LAg_AB47Lxw7AshtvPoG_EyzxUawN6_8f1MNBgMYDkYWFoTie_Xi0Yo0QsYLIJ_W-r1T/s4032/IMG_2037.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEX_fAziZ8QJFwCTjFQsOt0UKvWAavoQ0C02KIrY_lygnI4VeJdpOUtV71Vqar84qOb9JWvmijs4vj-YqA1rxjUJJmOUck6Oo7aTmtW9GPhH2HAZTMXsqanEi4LAg_AB47Lxw7AshtvPoG_EyzxUawN6_8f1MNBgMYDkYWFoTie_Xi0Yo0QsYLIJ_W-r1T/w240-h320/IMG_2037.jpeg" width="240" /></a></div><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #363636; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Peter Heather is the chair of medieval history at King’s College, London, and has written an historian's history, <b><i>Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion AD 300-1300</i></b> (NY: Knopf, 2023). In over 700 pages, Heather deals with a thousand years of European history, the first millennium of Christian Europe ("Christendom"). The premise underlying what he sees as his new approach to the subject is the change caused by our own contemporary experience e of the decline of Christianity in the modern world. In the past, it was possible to assume that Christianity's victory over its Roman and post-Roman rivals reflected Christianity's religious superiority. <i>Christendom</i> is the author's response to "the pressing intellectual challenge of reassessing Christianity's rise to pre-eminent hint he light of its modern eclipse, by re-examining the historical processes that first generated the defining coincidence between Europe and the cultural dominance of the Christian religion."</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #363636; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;"><span style="font-family: arial;">This leads him, for example, to reinterpret Roman religious history after Constantine's conversion less as the Christianization of the empire but rather more as the "Romanization of Christianity." This leads him to emphasize the element of contingency on the historical process. At any number of points, things could conceivably have gone differently had not this or that non-inevitably development occurred.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #363636; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Part One deals with the late imperial period, when, in the aftermath of Constantine's conversion, the Christian religion recruited classical philosophy and institutionalized itself as part of the Roman state system, with all the advantages that gave it. Part Two examines the end of the empire in the West and the crisis that created for Christianity (specifically Nicene Christianity), resolved by a combination religious "self-reinvention" as a religion suitable for a warrior society and success in terms of the eventual embrace of Nicene Christianity by the successor states, which inherited the Roman emperor's religious role. Finally Part Three considers the coherent leadership of the restored empire of Charlemagne and the subsequent spread of Christianity to virtually all of Europe and its successful transformation into the popular mass religion and highly institutionalized structure we are familiar with from the High middle Ages. In the process, the reader learns an enormous amount of incredible detail about the political and cultural history of Christian Europe's formative thousand years.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #363636; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Heather fully recognizes that some (maybe many) Christinas embraced their faith for authentically religious reasons and practiced and promoted authentic Christian piety. However, he always gives greater weight to the multitude of other complex considerations and motivations and contingent events which made the growth and expansion and triumph of Christendom possible, particularly among political and social elites. That faith itself was a key component in Christianity's constant "self-reinvention" is not denied, but tends to seem secondary to other more humanly explicable explanations for Christianity's success. Of course, a faith perspective will accept much of Heather's more secular data but also consider those developments as providential.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #363636; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;"><span style="font-family: arial;">It is valuable to know the contingencies that - whether by historical happenstance or by the plan of providence - produced Christian Europe. For, as the author rightly recognizes, we are once again in a world where there are other alternatives, and Christianity can only benefit from fuller reflection on his the faith has managed at other times when here were other alternatives.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #363636; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The author himself acknowledges that the present situation is not entirely new. Christendom also experienced a radical reduction in the aftermath of the rise of Islam, which not only conquered considerable Christian territory but provided an analogous situation (but this tine in reverse) to the mass conversion experience in the late Roman Empire. So the contemporary situation is not as new as it might seem. Then the old heartland of Christianity fell to Islam and was replaced by a new European centered Christianity. Now that European heartland seems to be giving way to a secular, post-Christian alternative, and seems likewise to be in the process of being replaced by a new "self-reinvention" of Christianity, based in the Global South.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #363636; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Likewise, his emphasis on the weakness of the papacy in the first two periods he describes was in an analogous manner repeated in modern European history, in the period prior to and immediately after the French Revolution, only to be followed by the present period in which the papacy appears religiously more centralized and powerful than at any previous period, including even the High Middle Ages - but this time without the coercive powers he ascribes to the late medieval Church.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p>City Fatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17769559147659492086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538477881080991285.post-83455006481850989752024-03-17T10:05:00.000-04:002024-03-17T10:05:09.146-04:00Seeing Jesus<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMgBOBuAJRyIstXO7QAbzn6i_e7HyBLTd8UXPaq1Z0QhvAPTqCTfpK7A-MumBIimv6DAKEKV7pPe7dRYtTGbLiWjNmFP_H4bmnoOAFMe3vadH7T9A49KPu1LhZU8n8p-uzm1IhfeeMJLic3fd-k-rwiZ9HYET4Jdf5v8xk2KqecdeG_hhrM-Xnda1i-lw1/s4032/IMG_2036.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMgBOBuAJRyIstXO7QAbzn6i_e7HyBLTd8UXPaq1Z0QhvAPTqCTfpK7A-MumBIimv6DAKEKV7pPe7dRYtTGbLiWjNmFP_H4bmnoOAFMe3vadH7T9A49KPu1LhZU8n8p-uzm1IhfeeMJLic3fd-k-rwiZ9HYET4Jdf5v8xk2KqecdeG_hhrM-Xnda1i-lw1/s320/IMG_2036.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"> </span></i></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; text-align: left;"> </span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">Thirty-something years ago, when I was serving as deacon down the road at Saint Malachy’s, the so-called “Actors’ Chapel” (so-called because of its historic ministry to the theater-district), I vividly remember how, after the Saturday afternoon matinee, a crowd would gather outside the theater across the street to get a glimpse of some actor or actress in the cast. More or less, that is how I imagine the scene in today’s Gospel, when</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif"> </span><i>some Greeks came to Philip and asked him, “Sir, we would like to see Jesus.”</i><span face="Arial, sans-serif"> </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif">They approached Philip, because being</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif"> </span><i>from Bethsaida in Galilee,</i><span face="Arial, sans-serif"> </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif">he presumably could converse comfortably with them in Greek. Mindful of his place in the group’s hierarchy, however, Philip</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif"> </span><i>went and told Andrew</i><span face="Arial, sans-serif">, Peter’s brother.</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif"> </span><i>Then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus.</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Now, you might think that after all this we might hear more about those Greeks and their meeting with Jesus. John never mentions them again, however. We never even hear whether or not they actually got to meet Jesus. We may presume that, along with Andrew and Philip and probably the rest of the crowd, they at least got to hear him – to hear him speak about how <i>the hour </i>had<i> come for the Son of Man to be glorified</i>, and hear him pray <i>“Father, glorify your name,” </i>the prayer of a faithful Son, full of confidence in his Father’s response. In fact, assuming they hung around long enough, they would also have heard the Father’s answer, when <i>a voice came from heaven, </i></span><i><span style="font-family: arial;">“I have glorified it and will glorify it again.”</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Of course, <i>the crowd there</i> disagreed – as many people then did and many people still do (and do a lot) - about Jesus. And, so, some said, <i>“An Angel has spoken to him,” </i>but others just thought <i>it was thunder</i>. Just <i>thunder</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Who and what Jesus is – the Son of the living God, or a long-dead historical curiosity, a passing fad that came and went with all the permanence of the last thunderstorm – is also at the heart of who and what WE are, here and now. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 8pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Conditioned as we all are by our contemporary visual media and by photo and film records of recent historical figures and events, it would be only natural that we<i> </i>too <i>would like</i> to have seen Jesus. Obviously, such access to the past is not possible. The only Jesus we can have any actual access to in the present is the Risen Christ, the living Son of God, sitting at the Father’s right hand, who intercedes forever on our behalf. Like the Greeks, who, for their access to Jesus, went to Philip and Andrew (in other words, to those appointed as Apostles), our access to Jesus, our encounter with Christ, is through the Church, which continues his life and mission in the world.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 8pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">We, who are here today, we encounter Christ through our experience of being his Church – not just what happens here on Sunday, but in a very special way what happens here on Sunday, which in turn further forms us as Church for the rest of the week and indeed the rest of life. At every Mass every day before the Sign of Peace, we pray <i>Look not on our sins, but on the faith of your <u>Church</u>.</i> The Church is that whole host of the faithful both living and dead who sustain us in faith, in hope, and in love, a Communion of Saints that unites us here and now with the faithful all over the world and back through time with those who have shown Christ to the world in the past. That is why the saints are so important for us. – like, for example, our city’s patron, Saint Patrick, who died on this date over 1500 years ago after having extended the Church’s reach even beyond the borders of the Roman Empire.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 8pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">What this also means is that (again like the Greeks in the Gospel) the rest of the world – the pagan world then, the secular world now - also encounters Christ primarily through its experience of his Church, which is to say, its experience of us. Indeed, as has often been said, the Church is essentially the only experience of Christ most people will ever have in life – the face of Christ that they see, the word of God that they hear. So (and this is the problematic part) if in any way our behavior conceals rather than reveals the face of Christ, then the word of God may seem silent - precisely when and where it may most need to be proclaimed - and the love of God may appear absent from the very world Christ became part of, precisely in order to save it.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 8pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">We hear many stories about sons in the Bible – from Cain and Abel on – bad sons, good sons, jealous sons, prodigal sons, and faithful obedient sons. In Jesus, we see the ultimately good and faithful Son, God’s Son, whose <i>perfect obedience</i> is <i>the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.</i><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 8pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">In that, he is everything there is to be. Revealed in and through his Church, he is everything anyone ever needs to hear or see.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 8pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">All the more reason then, to make sure he is heard and seen in and through us!<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><i><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-family: arial;">Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, March 17, 2024.</span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><i><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><i><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-family: arial;">Photo: Lent 2024 at Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY.</span></span></i></p>City Fatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17769559147659492086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538477881080991285.post-56287779331011400642024-03-16T09:34:00.000-04:002024-03-16T09:34:06.069-04:00Missionary to the Whole World<p style="text-align: justify;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihP6RbCkkr5fju9myRH5CQr0cvF92xmlVLTNKFhN7on2UkArE_aV4NplncpOJLSFnlQQB8Wa6xIOXrUyk1OA_ltX691RZWyUHOreOHiT7hzHXG486JFpE8_x8dlhz1vZqds8EwxDOxOs6GbZeBxZFkgf6YctBku7XNOHWcWnBCa4p0n75plgcqnFKuN00M/s1650/slide%202%20patrick.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1650" data-original-width="1275" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihP6RbCkkr5fju9myRH5CQr0cvF92xmlVLTNKFhN7on2UkArE_aV4NplncpOJLSFnlQQB8Wa6xIOXrUyk1OA_ltX691RZWyUHOreOHiT7hzHXG486JFpE8_x8dlhz1vZqds8EwxDOxOs6GbZeBxZFkgf6YctBku7XNOHWcWnBCa4p0n75plgcqnFKuN00M/s320/slide%202%20patrick.jpg" width="247" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">As if one Saint Patrick's Day per year were not enough, the calendrical quirk, according to which this year the anniversary of the saint's death falls on a Sunday, gives us two additional Saint Patrick's Days - the religious one on Monday, March 18, and the civic one, highlighted by the famous 5th-Avenue parade today. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Other than the fact that he never saw, let alone ate, a potato, we don't know as much as we might wish about Saint Patrick. We do know that he was the son of a deacon and the grandson of a priest, who was born into a well-to-do family of landed gentry in the Roman province of Britain. At 16, his comfortable life suddenly ceased when he was captured and enslaved by Irish raiders. During 6 years as a slave herdsman in what is now County Mayo, Ireland, Patrick’s conventional Christianity was transformed into an ardent, fervent faith. After a successful escape and return to Britain, he felt a call to convert the pagan Irish to Christianity. Ordained a bishop, he returned to Ireland and remained there until his death on March 17, 461.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 8pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Unlike Patrick’s home island of Britain, Ireland had never been part of the Roman Empire. It was beyond the borders of what then constituted civilization. Saint Patrick stands out as one of the first in Western Christian history to feel the imperative to evangelize beyond the borders of the Empire, to take literally the the Gospel’s mandate to teach all nations. In his <i>Confession</i>, Patrick described his sense of mission. “I want to spend myself in that country, even in death, if the Lord should grant me this favor. I am deeply in his debt, for he gave me the great grace that through me many peoples should be reborn in God, and then made perfect by confirmation and everywhere among them clergy ordained for a people so recently coming to believe, one people gathered by the Lord from the ends of the earth. ... It is among that people that I want to wait for the promise made by him, who assuredly never tells a lie. ... This is our faith: believers are to come from the whole world.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: arial; font-size: 8pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">An altar in honor of the great missionary Saint Patrick is found at the east end of the north aisle of the mother church of the Paulist Fathers in New York, the city of which Saint Patrick is also patron. It was designed by the same John LaFarge who also directed the original design of the church's nave, painted the circular mural </span><i>The Angel of the Moon</i><span face="Arial, sans-serif"> on the south wall of the sanctuary, and did the two blue end windows above the sanctuary and the five lancet windows above the main door. The altarpiece <i>(photo)</i> was painted by William Laurel Harris, who also painted the large mural </span><i>The Crucifixion </i><span face="Arial, sans-serif">over the main door. It portrays St. Patrick, flanked by Saints Columba and Bridget, driving out paganism, while, above, St. Patrick preaches to an Irish chieftan. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">In this particularly challenging period in the Church's life, when so much ecclesial energy is focused internally and Catholic elites are increasingly polarized about issues of internal church organization and polity, it is good to be reminded of the Church's missionary mandate. It may also serve as a bittersweet reminder that the mandate is never fully fulfilled, that many places once seemingly converted to Christ and his Church have since followed other paths and require re-evangelization, which may prove to be the contemporary Church's most pressing - and neglected - task.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><b style="text-align: start;"><i><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 8pt;"><br clear="all" style="break-before: page;" /></span></i></b><span style="text-align: start;"></span></p>City Fatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17769559147659492086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538477881080991285.post-32929235388638492252024-03-14T09:23:00.005-04:002024-03-14T10:08:36.198-04:00Cabrini (The Movie)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvHDDZPmpK_pPxGK1zCvCyFVd6IovWe81M2X-i6gCIxJly4oZ-SLQOTwcPHe7UadIb5ob3n3kd8aMjUh0LpLN1p0FjFR5s7n0H1T_j7lUYPQcfazNpfF9dyo_8qY6-I0RG4ZrQGTH1XkZ6D3gVEWZ7TqtXbW7P8GwrfupIa1Q1uEuC9TCKwLtoYEuXsgX2/s387/Cabrini_Official_Theatrical_Poster_(2024_film).jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="387" data-original-width="261" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvHDDZPmpK_pPxGK1zCvCyFVd6IovWe81M2X-i6gCIxJly4oZ-SLQOTwcPHe7UadIb5ob3n3kd8aMjUh0LpLN1p0FjFR5s7n0H1T_j7lUYPQcfazNpfF9dyo_8qY6-I0RG4ZrQGTH1XkZ6D3gVEWZ7TqtXbW7P8GwrfupIa1Q1uEuC9TCKwLtoYEuXsgX2/s320/Cabrini_Official_Theatrical_Poster_(2024_film).jpg" width="216" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">She is the patron saint of immigrants, Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, who lived from 1850 to 1917. Born in Italy, she founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart in 1880, of which she remained Superior General until her death. When she asked Pope Leo XIII's approval to establish a mission in China, the Pope advised her to go "not to the east, but to the west" - to the United States to serve the immense needs of the hordes of poor Italian immigrants who were then flooding the cities of the United States. So, she and six other sisters came to New York, where, like so many other Italian immigrants, she was less than enthusiastically received by those in charge, including New York's Irish Catholic establishment – in her case, New York’s Archbishop Michael Corrigan. But she persisted in her mission, and over time she founded some 67 institutions in major cities both in the United States and in South America. In their day, those institutions served Italian and other immigrants and made a notable impact in their communities. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Mother Cabrini died in Chicago on December 22, 1917, and is buried where her American mission began, here in New York, in a shrine on Fort Washington Avenue near Fort Tryon Park in northern Manhattan. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Having become a naturalized American citizen in 1909 (thus, in effect, experiencing herself the fullness of the American immigrant experience), she became the first American citizen to be canonized in 1946. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Mother Cabrini had special significance for my grandmother, who, as long as she lived, made sure that we went to visit her shrine yearly to honor the great Italian patron of immigrants to the New World. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">And now she is the subject of a full-length film, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: arial; orphans: 2; text-align: left; widows: 2;"><b style="font-style: italic;">Cabrini, </b>released earlier this month, which highlights her missionary and charitable efforts and the</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: arial; orphans: 2; text-align: left; widows: 2;"> resistance she encountered, especially </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: arial; orphans: 2; text-align: left; widows: 2;">the</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: arial; orphans: 2; text-align: left; widows: 2;"> anti-Italian bigotry and racism.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: arial; orphans: 2; text-align: left; widows: 2;"> The film focuses on the desperate plight of Italian immigrants in New York and on Mother Cabrini's immense energy (despite her physical frailty) and her enormous ability as in effect a shrewd entrepreneur, founding what the film calls "an empire of hope." In conventional treatments of her story, both her physical frailties and her business acumen are acknowledged but always seem secondary to her accomplishments. In this film, they remain front and center, giving her accomplishments a fuller, more rounded dimension.</span><sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-5" style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: arial; line-height: 1; orphans: 2; text-align: left; unicode-bidi: isolate; white-space: nowrap; widows: 2;"></sup></p><p style="margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: arial; orphans: 2; text-align: left; widows: 2;">In <i>Shakespeare in Love</i>, Queen Elizabeth I refers to herself as "a woman in a man's profession." <i>Cabrini </i>seems to want to highlight how Saint Francis Cabrini was a woman very much disrupting a men's world. In fact, much of the same could be said of many modern religious foundresses. Indeed, for much of its history, the Catholic church. has provided women with a unique outlet for this-worldly talent through the institutions of women's religious communities, especially teaching and health-care communities, of which many were founded here in the U.S. and Canada.</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: arial; orphans: 2; text-align: left; widows: 2;">Overwhelmingly, the film focuses our attention not just on the plight of the late 19th-century Italian immigrants but. on the ethnic-racial-religious hostility to them on the part of the civic establishment and the larger society. Perhaps particularly relevant is how it portrays the struggle on the part of New York's Irish Archbishop to come to terms with the reality of a new ethnic component to his hitherto largely Irish flock. It offers insight into the dilemma that has faced each successive wave of immigration to this country, as unwelcome outsiders eventually get a toehold and gradually advance in society and then challenged their predecessors not to close the door behind them but to recognize their common humanity with the new immigrants. This, of course, is so very much an issue today as a nation composed almost entirely of descendants of desperate immigrants is confronted with the morally and politically challenging task of accepting and integrating new immigrants to our country.</span></p><p style="margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: arial; orphans: 2; text-align: left; widows: 2;">The story of Mother Cabrini is always edifying and always relevant. It may be never more so, however, than at this particular juncture in American history, when who we are as a people, as "a nation of immigrants," is once again one of the central issues confronting the soul of America.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-variant-ligatures: normal; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; orphans: 2; padding-bottom: 0.5em; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;"><br /></p>City Fatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17769559147659492086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538477881080991285.post-64416864461261941252024-03-11T10:01:00.006-04:002024-03-11T10:15:33.812-04:00Oscar Night<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgx4gsZIj-_TxoVINMXDbtjAEOQNQaxXghJ7fgOv63w4SHtuJi2HbFdE2uH6hoWsgd2iXzC7iVgI3HYPKCXP51wKQefemvpVDSRMJAGTWrd5W1BTXKfaK3pkchyaxG9nad2_UdMJDLY271QgXxscTJJH0xL4PL_dwsg3dr25cUaudb9WSOh94eF_dmVlZTR/s528/96th%20Academy%20Awards.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="299" data-original-width="528" height="181" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgx4gsZIj-_TxoVINMXDbtjAEOQNQaxXghJ7fgOv63w4SHtuJi2HbFdE2uH6hoWsgd2iXzC7iVgI3HYPKCXP51wKQefemvpVDSRMJAGTWrd5W1BTXKfaK3pkchyaxG9nad2_UdMJDLY271QgXxscTJJH0xL4PL_dwsg3dr25cUaudb9WSOh94eF_dmVlZTR/s320/96th%20Academy%20Awards.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The 96th Academy Awards - Hollywood's annual celebration of itself - took place last night. Because of travel, I missed the first part of the show. Usually, when I have watched the Oscar show, it has been more for social reasons than an overwhelming interest in the proceedings themselves. Las nights show, however, seemed - at least to my unsophisticated tastes - an improvement on past performances. Best of all, it seemed shorter, ending at a decent hour.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">It was no surprise that <i>Oppenheimer</i> more or less stole the show. Personally, I would have given <i>The Holdovers</i>' Paul Giamatti the Oscar for Best Actor, but it is always hard to stop a runaway train. Robert Downey, Jr., may well have deserved his award, but <i>Oppenheimer</i> would have been a better move without most of the last hour, in which case Downey's award would inevitably have had to go to someone else. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><p><span style="font-family: arial;">As seems typical of very long movies, <i style="font-family: "Google Sans", Roboto, arial, sans-serif; orphans: 2; text-align: left; widows: 2;">Oppenheimer</i> is likely longer than it needs to be. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Apart, obviously, from the dramatic, convincingly scary, central scene of the Trinity atomic test, it is largely a three-hour talk-fest. </span>Its artistry seems to me to be overdone and thus gets in the way of the story. Accordingly, I have been criticized for disrespecting the director's artistry, but artistic self-expression leaves me unmoved, whatever the medium. That said, its length is worth sitting through, and its artistry of entangled timelines, constant scene-shifting amid a confusingly large cohort of famous scientists (whose names most of us no longer remember or never knew), and its gratuitous back-and-forth from color to black-and-white are all still worth the extra work they impose on the audience.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><i>Oppenheimer</i> aside, it was nice that the original <i>Mothers Day</i> got so much attention at the Oscars. Maybe the most moving moment was when<span style="background-color: white; letter-spacing: -0.006875rem; orphans: 2; text-align: start; widows: 2;"> Mstyslav Chernov </span><span style="background-color: white; letter-spacing: -0.006875rem; orphans: 2; text-align: start; widows: 2;">accepted the documentary award for</span><span style="background-color: white; letter-spacing: -0.006875rem; orphans: 2; text-align: start; widows: 2;"> </span><em style="background-color: white; border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; letter-spacing: -0.006875rem; orphans: 2; text-align: start; widows: 2;">20 Days in Mariupol</em><span style="background-color: white; letter-spacing: -0.006875rem; orphans: 2; text-align: start; widows: 2;">, which he called</span><span style="background-color: white; orphans: 2; text-align: start; widows: 2;"><span style="letter-spacing: -0.006875rem;"> Ukraine’s first Oscar. Given what is happening (or perhaps one </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.11px;">should</span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.006875rem;"> say not </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.11px;">happening) in Washington right now, the reminder of the Ukraine war's civilizational significance</span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.006875rem;"> was timely. And, in keeping with the </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.11px;">evening's</span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.006875rem;"> primary purpose of focusing on movies, I resonated with what may prove to be one of the evening's more memorable comments, “Cinema forms memories and memories form histories.”</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; orphans: 2; text-align: start; widows: 2;"><span style="letter-spacing: -0.006875rem;">Otherwise, the Oscars show seemed somewhat less </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.11px;">political</span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.006875rem;"> </span></span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.11px;">than usual - apart from Jimmy Kimmel's great "Isn't it past your jail time?"</span><span style="background-color: white; font-variant-ligatures: normal; letter-spacing: -0.11px; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;"> response to Donald Trump, who unsurprisingly could not resist </span><span style="background-color: white; orphans: 2; text-align: start; widows: 2;"><span style="color: #363636;">the opportunity for a real-time post on Truth Social by Trump. “Has there ever been a worse host than Jimmy Kimmel at the Oscars.” In that exchange (and with that audience) Kimmel <span style="caret-color: rgb(54, 54, 54);">clearly</span> won.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; font-variant-ligatures: normal; letter-spacing: -0.11px; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;">But for me the most fun part of the evening had to be Ryan Gosling's rousingly wild, </span><span style="background-color: white; orphans: 2; text-align: start; widows: 2;"><span style="letter-spacing: -0.11px;">show stopping, rendition of <i>I’m Just Ken</i>. All in all, quite contrary to my recent experience and despite the obvious lack of suspense about most of the winners, the Oscar show was actually fun to watch this year!</span></span></p></span><br /></div>City Fatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17769559147659492086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538477881080991285.post-18820786113666347602024-03-10T04:23:00.001-04:002024-03-10T04:23:19.097-04:00Mid-Lent in East Tennessee<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdAfD3i_Jkw763aLEohhvxbteefJY-3KXIX-I6ELWt9Ep_yxjcgS0SLT0_KQGceVw2T2Y2VLwzu5Hmln_7WBpiyqSNsOXR2iLBYHlTP45uYBO3KRnkDqTTcliuWBCzVVhSHk3dC0d8HV7Stbu0hobCf3vkcBO34X3zyqWxuUNhwAnnQkg0IogKR-Oy87yD/s431/IC%20Knoxville.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="431" data-original-width="295" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdAfD3i_Jkw763aLEohhvxbteefJY-3KXIX-I6ELWt9Ep_yxjcgS0SLT0_KQGceVw2T2Y2VLwzu5Hmln_7WBpiyqSNsOXR2iLBYHlTP45uYBO3KRnkDqTTcliuWBCzVVhSHk3dC0d8HV7Stbu0hobCf3vkcBO34X3zyqWxuUNhwAnnQkg0IogKR-Oy87yD/s320/IC%20Knoxville.jpg" width="219" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">A couple of weeks ago, we all heard Peter’s famous words while watching Jesus transfigured: <i>Lord, it is good for us to be here! </i>Now I am <u>not</u> Peter, and Summit Hill is not quite Mount Tabor, but – with all the appropriate caveats – I can with all my heart echo Peter today: <i>how good it is to be here</i>! In my 28+ years of priesthood, I have had an abundance of good experiences, but I can say with no exaggeration that I never have I been happier as a priest than in my 10 years here as your pastor. So, it is good to be here!<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 10pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">And in that spirit of genuine joy, we mark this <i>Laetare Sunday</i>, as is the Church’s custom with rose vestments and flowers on the altar, traditional symbols of rejoicing, even as we push full speed ahead into the even more somber second half of Lent.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 10pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Last night, some of you were present at The Foundry for our retrospective on 50 years of Paulist ministry in Knoxville. In fact, as many of you may know, the Paulist Fathers have been serving the Church in Tennessee much longer than that, starting way back in 1900 with 54 years of mission outreach in Middle Tennessee. With Winchester, TN, as the Paulist Fathers’ home base, those early missionaries preached literally from a trailer and helped establish parishes which still thrive today in the capable hands of the local diocesan clergy. Then, from 1954 until 2013, the Paulist Fathers maintained a major mission parish in Memphis. And then, as you all know, we have been here in Knoxville since 1973, sharing the good news of Christ and the life of his Church in this city’s downtown at its oldest Catholic Church and at its university. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 9pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">As Paulist Fathers, we are committed obviously to the mission of the Church and, in a special way, to our founder, Servant of God Isaac Hecker’s conviction that the Catholic Church was just what American culture needed. The world has changed a lot since Hecker’s time, but the Church’s mission - our mission - remains the same. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">As Pope Saint John Paul II famously said: “Those who have come into genuine contact with Christ cannot keep him for themselves, they must proclaim him.” It was for that reason that Hecker felt inspired by the example of Saint Paul and chose him as our community’s patron.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 9pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">Along with preaching and teaching and organizing local churches and recruiting leaders for them, an important part of Paul’s apostolic activity was raising money. According to the Acts of the Apostles, Paul and his mission partner, Barnabas, brought financial aid for the struggling community in Jerusalem from the Church in Antioch when they went to Jerusalem around the year 46 </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 8pt;">[Acts 11:29-30]</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif">. Over the next decade, a very busy and productive period for Paul, he continued to raise money from his Gentile converts to assist the struggling Church in Jerusalem and wrote about this in some detail in his two letters to the Corinthians </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 8pt;">[1 Corinthians 16:1-4; 2 Corinthians 8–9]</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif"> and in his letter to the Romans </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;">[</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 8pt;">Romans 15:25-33]. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 9pt;"> </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Paul’s Financial Appeal was a charitable response to the real needs and struggles of the Jerusalem community and the special responsibilities the Jerusalem Church had in relation to other Christian communities. It was also an expression of – and, for his Gentile converts, a lesson in - the unity and interdependence of individuals and local communities in the wider Church. Paul took this responsibility very seriously, as an essential expression of what it means to be a Church community, what it means to be diverse and different people all united in one Church, one Body of Christ. That is the spirit in which we should approach all the appeals we receive to unite our efforts to meet the multiple needs of the Church here and elsewhere. Among those is our Annual Paulist Appeal, our annual invitation to you to contribute as you can to continue the life and mission of the Paulist Fathers as we with our reduced numbers and aging membership still seek to make real Hecker’s conviction that the Catholic Church is just what American culture needs – because, as we just heard, <i>God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, </i></span><i style="font-family: arial;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">but that the world might be saved through him</span></i><span style="font-family: arial;">.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">At a particularly challenging and decisive moment in Israel’s history, God called the king of Persia, of all people, to be his chosen instrument in restoring Israel and its Temple. Likewise today, God continues to call upon each of us in surprising and unexpected ways to do surprising and unexpected things.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i><span face="Arial, sans-serif">Homily for the 4<sup>th</sup> Sunday of Lent (Laetare Sunday) and the Annual Paulist Appeal, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, March 10, 2014.</span></i><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></p></div>City Fatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17769559147659492086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538477881080991285.post-65765371092559250622024-03-07T08:18:00.001-05:002024-03-07T08:18:20.239-05:00750<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxF6lem0lsx0IvO1icK0UzmtCDB5k1JaGKUBsaq8BVK9H0w1spBmoLtjVyHoSKKxNIhGdO_0raPQZthi_UEY5OFU_mNQF4GDcdkpg893NPUo1TM95I3fZz0WcIpfjjO7kE4hokxNPMoJ7YuaC5kx3AesStaJvAtmAsEH_O7Cz-K6ow_qDFTxb4513BUdlI/s5712/IMG_2028.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="5712" data-original-width="4284" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxF6lem0lsx0IvO1icK0UzmtCDB5k1JaGKUBsaq8BVK9H0w1spBmoLtjVyHoSKKxNIhGdO_0raPQZthi_UEY5OFU_mNQF4GDcdkpg893NPUo1TM95I3fZz0WcIpfjjO7kE4hokxNPMoJ7YuaC5kx3AesStaJvAtmAsEH_O7Cz-K6ow_qDFTxb4513BUdlI/s320/IMG_2028.jpeg" width="240" /></a></div><p></p><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Fifty years ago today, to mark the 700th anniversary of the death of Saint Thomas Aquinas, some of us celebrated that occasion with the late Professor Paul Sigmund and a bottle of Chilean wine at dinner in the Princeton University Graduate College's Proctor Hall. </span></p><div dir="ltr" style="outline: currentcolor; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: small; outline: currentcolor;">Much earlier (long before I was a grad student), most of my elementary school teachers had been Blauvelt Dominican Sisters. From them, I learned bits and pieces about the Dominican Order's history and distinctive liturgy. (We even recited the Rosary in the distinctively Dominican manner.) Above all, however, we learned a lot about the Dominicans' favorite son among the saints and Doctors of the Church, Saint Thomas Aquinas, who was especially relevant to us as the author of the two hymns (<i style="outline: currentcolor;">O </i></span><span style="outline: currentcolor;"><i style="outline: currentcolor;">salutaris</i> and <i style="outline: currentcolor;">Tantum ergo</i>), which we sang so frequently at Benediction of the Most Blessed Sacrament. At school, we also learned the familiar story of how young Thomas met the Dominicans at the new University of Naples, how his family opposed his professing a mendicant vocation, how they kidnapped him in 1244, and how he persevered in his vocation in spite of all family pressure. (During his captivity at the family's castles at Montesangiovanni and Roccasecca, the young Thomas supposedly read through the entire bible and also studied Peter Lombard's <i style="outline: currentcolor;">Sentences</i>.) </span></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="outline: currentcolor; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="outline: currentcolor; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="outline: currentcolor;">At some point, I encountered G.K. Chesterton's short 1933 classic account of Thomas's life, </span><i style="outline: currentcolor;">The Dumb Ox, </i><span style="outline: currentcolor;">which took its title from a famous story about the young Thomas and his classmates as students of Saint Albert the Great. (Patron saint of scientists, Albert studied Aristotle and wrote a commentary on the <i style="outline: currentcolor;">Nicomachean Ethics</i>, during the very time Thomas was studying with him in Cologne.) </span></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="outline: currentcolor; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="outline: currentcolor;"><br /></span></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="outline: currentcolor; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="outline: currentcolor;">M<span style="outline: currentcolor;"><span style="outline: currentcolor;">aybe</span></span> more memorable for me than Chesterton's <i style="outline: currentcolor;">The Dumb Ox</i>, however, was my reading<span style="outline: currentcolor;"><span style="outline: currentcolor;"> in high school </span></span>of Louis de Wohl's 1950 historical novel about Aquinas, </span><i style="outline: currentcolor;">The Quiet Light</i><span style="outline: currentcolor;">, which situated Thomas's religious vocation and theological achievement against the tumultuous background of 13th-century medieval Christendom in total turmoil. It was only later, in graduate school, the I engaged directly with the Angelic Doctor, primarily with his political and legal philosophy, some of which seems surprisingly topical today. (For example, at the end of chapter 6 of part 1 of <i>De Regime Principum</i>, Thomas warns about political actors who, not caring about the glory classically achieved by virtuous action, desire only to dominate and will openly commit crimes to obtain what they want.) </span></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="outline: currentcolor; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br style="outline: currentcolor;" /></span></div><div data-setdir="false" dir="ltr" style="outline: currentcolor; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Formed in the Aristotelian-Averroist atmosphere of the new University of Naples (founded by Frederick II, "Stupor Mundi," as an imperial rather than ecclesiastical institution), the young Thomas arrived at an early appreciation of Aristotle's philosophy - at a time when that was an increasingly controversial position. For Thomas, all truth - whether divinely revealed truth accessible through faith or naturally knowable truth accessible to anyone through philosophy - is truth. There are thus two kinds of truth but only one truth, which admits no contradiction. If Christian doctrine is true, then it must not be contradicted by the wisdom accessible to ordinary human beings, which is based on what we can understand from the world, within which we human beings are rooted. Theology is faith seeking understanding, relating what is incomprehensible to what is naturally knowable. Thomism was Christian history's most systematic answer to the perennial problematic (still very much with us today) of how to connect what is believed by divine revelation with what is naturally knowable both by believers and non-believers - addressing contemporary realities in a timely manner making use of both old and new wisdom.</span></div><div data-setdir="false" dir="ltr" style="outline: currentcolor; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div data-setdir="false" dir="ltr" style="outline: currentcolor; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">In the theologically and polarized environment of the early medieval universities, Thomas's profession required him to participate in public disputations. But he treated these primarily as a common effort to arrive at truth rather than as a competition. How unlike the modern university, which one of my professors once described as "a holding company for individual entrepreneurs."</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="outline: currentcolor; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br style="outline: currentcolor;" /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="outline: currentcolor; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">In the 16th century, Thomas was the first "modern" saint to be recognized officially as a Doctor of the Church, joining the ancient Doctors - Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory the Great. He is known as <i style="outline: currentcolor;">Doctor communis</i>, the common or universal teacher. But he is also called <i style="outline: currentcolor;">Doctor angelicus</i>, the Angelic Doctor, which reminds us how Thomas was always so much more than a university professor.</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="outline: currentcolor; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br style="outline: currentcolor;" /></span></div><div data-setdir="false" dir="ltr" style="outline: currentcolor; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">First and foremost, however, Thomas was a Dominican friar, who had successfully resisted the strenuous efforts of his powerful family in order to live the life of a mendicant, a vocation in some ways as controversial in the 13th-century Church as b<span style="outline: currentcolor;">eing as Aristotelian was</span>. As an Order of Preachers, the Dominicans were especially devoted to study and cultivated an intellectual vocation, but that was always understood as serving the spiritual benefit of others (as the General Chapter of 1220 had explicitly prescribed). Thomas certainly saw himself as a contemplative, but he accorded the highest religious status to a kind of contemplative life that produced benefits for others in the form of preaching and teaching. Thus, he wrote his Summa <i style="outline: currentcolor;">ad eruditionem incipientium</i>, for the instruction of beginners. And <span style="outline: currentcolor;">the same Saint Thomas who excelled as an author and professor, writing and teaching in Latin, also employed his talents as a public preacher in Italian churches. I am reminded of Louis Bouyer's observation in his <i>Memoirs</i> that, unless pursued within the context of Church ministry, theology "loses contact with what gives it meaning," and "can either vanish into fruitless abstractions or degenerate into an almost empty verbal pastime."</span></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="outline: currentcolor; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br style="outline: currentcolor;" /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="outline: currentcolor; text-align: justify;"><span style="outline: currentcolor;"><span style="font-family: arial;">When faced with a challenge, Thomas prepared by prayer. He</span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"> was, above all, a priest, a person of prayer, which he considered the most important contemplative activity and which he also recognized as God's gift. He went to confession daily, said Mass, and then served or attended another Mass in thanksgiving. His devotion to the Eucharist was recognized when Pope Urban IV commissioned him to compose the Office and Mass for the new feast of Corpus Christi (from which were derived those familiar Benediction hymns). Before receiving Communion shortly before his death, Thomas prayed: "I receive you, price of my soul's redemption; I receive you, Viaticum for my pilgrimage, for whose love I have studied, kept watch, labored, preached, and taught."</span></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div data-setdir="false" dir="ltr" style="outline: currentcolor; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">One may only hope that the same scholarly spirit that contributed so much to the renewal of the Church amid the political and intellectual turbulence of the 13th century may illuminate and inspire the ongoing renewal of religious life and the Church amid today's terrible tumults!</span></div><div data-setdir="false" dir="ltr" style="outline: currentcolor; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div data-setdir="false" dir="ltr" style="outline: currentcolor; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>Photo: Image of Saint Thomas Aquinas, formerly on display at the Paulist Fathers' Seminary in Washington, DC, now at the Paulist Fathers' Motherhouse in New York City.</i></span></div>City Fatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17769559147659492086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538477881080991285.post-79142012370189088532024-03-04T10:16:00.000-05:002024-03-04T10:16:02.438-05:00Can We Keep It?<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZKLIdX3GfqexuDgVghGKAmlGO3-TAtQjNuy2zFIolhOPQg-f8cimfzAuH5TnZ5UdwqdeRk181Pj77oMdUVcKnQgBOk7UgcNj4D9wI74kkC1_3JHN3CT4OOfy6hbUpS3df0kW1X05m3N2Jg8GVZjBvrlcksEyNTwS8h4EuTjhjnh1CHFZjbWQPEkvP5dI-/s3334/Gilbert_Stuart_George_Washington_Lansdowne_portrait_1796.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3334" data-original-width="2076" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZKLIdX3GfqexuDgVghGKAmlGO3-TAtQjNuy2zFIolhOPQg-f8cimfzAuH5TnZ5UdwqdeRk181Pj77oMdUVcKnQgBOk7UgcNj4D9wI74kkC1_3JHN3CT4OOfy6hbUpS3df0kW1X05m3N2Jg8GVZjBvrlcksEyNTwS8h4EuTjhjnh1CHFZjbWQPEkvP5dI-/s320/Gilbert_Stuart_George_Washington_Lansdowne_portrait_1796.jpg" width="199" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">235 years ago today, on March 4, 1789, our current U.S. Constitution went into effect (which is why presidential and congressional terms of office b</span><span style="font-family: arial;">egan and ended on this date until</span><span style="font-family: arial;"> the 20th amendment changed those dates)</span><span style="font-family: arial;">. Just two years earlier, at the end of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in September 1787, Benjamin Franklin had supposedly been asked what kind of government the new constitution had created. His now famous response was, "A Republic, if you can keep it."</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i><u>If</u> you can keep it. </i>Franklin's rhetorical question has acquired a renewed salience in recent years. Perhaps not since the American Civil War in the 1860s has the answer been more in doubt.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">In the unique path that American history has followed from the founding, the classical <i>republican</i> tradition was especially dear to the founders, every bit as dear as (maybe more than) the liberal-capitalist tradition inherited from John Locke and the other usual suspects of the Enlightenment conspiracy against traditional communitarianism. The </span><i style="font-family: arial;">republican</i><span style="font-family: arial;"> tradition has long emphasized <i>citizenship</i> and citizen virtue. Self-government requires citizens who take citizenship seriously. That means that they take community seriously, which is always in tension with the Lockean liberal capitalist individualist tradition, which at its worse degenerates into libertarianism but which remains somewhat problematic even at its best because of its valorization of the individual over the community. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The civic republican tradition has long contrasted <i>republic citizen virtue</i> with corruption, and I think it is really hard to understand the U.S. Constitution and the debates surrounding it without that context. Certainly, one can hardly read <i>The Federalist Papers </i>outside that tradition. What does the civic republican tradition have to say about the disordered values and disordered priorities of our present-day politics?</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="orphans: 2; text-align: justify; widows: 2;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Also, although the Constitution did not create an explicitly Christian republic and indeed specifically sought to preclude an official religious establishment, the U.S. was from the outset (and certainly since the Second Great Awakening) very much a kind of <i>Christian republic</i>. Of course, even before the First Amendment explicitly outlawed a federal religious establishment, article six specified </span><span style="background-color: white; orphans: 2; text-align: left; widows: 2;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States. </i>That said, one of the great examples of American </span></span><span style="font-family: arial;">exceptionalism has been the seemingly successful (at least until recently) harmonious combination at the <i>cultural</i> level of the classical republican tradition with religion. Thus J.G.A. Pocock famously observed in his Introduction to <i>The Machiavellian Moment</i>: "</span><span style="font-family: arial;">that the revival of the republican ideal by civic humanists posed the problem of a society, in which the political nature of man as described by Aristotle was to receive its fulfillment, seeking to exist in the framework of a Christian time-scheme which denied the possibility of any secular fulfillment." (</span><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>The Machiavellian Moment,</i> Princeton University Press, 1975). </span></div><div style="orphans: 2; text-align: justify; widows: 2;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Hence John Adams' famous formulation: </span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #202124; font-variant-ligatures: normal; text-align: left; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial;">“</span><span style="color: #040c28; font-variant-ligatures: normal; text-align: left; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial;">Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people</span><span style="color: #202124; font-variant-ligatures: normal; text-align: left; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial;">.</span></span><span style="background-color: white; font-variant-ligatures: normal; text-align: left; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial;"><span style="color: #202124;"> It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Between that and MAGA's moral and religious corruption, there can be no common ground. <i>A fortiori</i>, what our second president said about citizens' moral and religious virtue applies as much as <span style="caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 36);">and</span> more so to would-be leaders. Hence the famous White House Inscription, taken from a letter Adams wrote from the White House in 1800 to his wife </span></span></span><span style="color: #202124; font-family: arial;">Abigail (and eventually engraved on the State Dining Room mantlepiece in FDR's time): </span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="CalendasPlus, "Helvetica Nueue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 16px; orphans: 2; text-align: left; widows: 2;">“I Pray Heaven To Bestow The Best Of </span><span face="CalendasPlus, "Helvetica Nueue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 16px; orphans: 2; text-align: left; widows: 2;">Blessings On This House And All that shall hereafter Inhabit it. May none but Honest and Wise Men ever rule under This Roof.” </span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="CalendasPlus, "Helvetica Nueue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 16px; orphans: 2; text-align: left; widows: 2;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="CalendasPlus, "Helvetica Nueue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; orphans: 2; text-align: left; widows: 2;">Unfortunately, getting back to Franklin's warning whether or not we can keep our <i>republic</i>, former President (and present presidential candidate) Donald Trump has tested all the norms of civic republicanism, has pushed them beyond their limits, and in the process has brought us to the brink of one of the founders' great fears that (as befell republics in the past) ours would fall eventually prey to a non-civically-oriented demagogue. Even if Trump loses and the nation is saved from a catastrophic second Trump term, enormous damage has already been done to our political culture, to elections, to the rule of law, to the presumption in favor of the peaceful transfer of political power, and to the U.S. as a serious, trustworthy ally.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="CalendasPlus, "Helvetica Nueue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; orphans: 2; text-align: left; widows: 2;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="CalendasPlus, "Helvetica Nueue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; orphans: 2; text-align: left; widows: 2;">And that, sadly, is how it seems on our federal government's 235th anniversary!</span></span></div><div><div style="orphans: 2; text-align: justify; widows: 2;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><p></p></div>City Fatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17769559147659492086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538477881080991285.post-87801367136910121972024-03-02T21:59:00.000-05:002024-03-02T21:59:59.361-05:00A Road Map through Life's Desert<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMPzQR7B5rqKqdPZkbpetUSoElPX4366e5atMfYg0aTXH7cuTRfy0_qYGqQ9T_bP0ZMdZBmBMINIjBIPuMJtbNUVTEOUtbryJrbeG0Jp0GBOwOn9Sg348NLeJtCYqSe5WOHdk1U3i4dLNOBgdRQXMZDxdsvPZCQhv4npWPAeXVpgYA7lRO_0SXrvwbWoX0/s612/commandments.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="356" data-original-width="612" height="186" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMPzQR7B5rqKqdPZkbpetUSoElPX4366e5atMfYg0aTXH7cuTRfy0_qYGqQ9T_bP0ZMdZBmBMINIjBIPuMJtbNUVTEOUtbryJrbeG0Jp0GBOwOn9Sg348NLeJtCYqSe5WOHdk1U3i4dLNOBgdRQXMZDxdsvPZCQhv4npWPAeXVpgYA7lRO_0SXrvwbWoX0/s320/commandments.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Today’s Gospel’s account of an angry Jesus at war with the Temple’s money changers is a familiar one, which has had influence far beyond its original setting and significance. Almost a century ago, on March 4, 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated the 32<span>nd</span> President of the United States. Everyone remembers his famous line about the only thing we have to fear. That same speech also included the following words: <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i><span face="Arial, sans-serif">Yes, the money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of that restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than monetary profit.</span></i><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">In retrospect, FDR may have spoken too soon, too confidently about a future from which the money changers seem never to get completely evicted. But, in an era much more religiously literate than our own, he could at least be confident that almost everyone would recognize his reference to the story told in today’s Gospel.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The “cleansing of the Temple,” as it is often called, was certainly provocative. It may have been one of the principal provocations precipitating Jesus’ eventual arrest and execution, which would certainly add significance to our retelling this story during Lent.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">Around 20 BC, King Herod the Great had begun a grandiose renovation of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, making the Temple, which since Solomon’s time had been the central site for Jewish worship, one of the most impressive shrines in the ancient world. </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif">It was the ultimate “stimulus package,” one of the largest construction projects of its time.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">In the process, however, the classical, pagan model of a temple as a cultural, commercial, and social center seemed to creep in from the surrounding culture. Jesus’ strong reaction to the various activities taking place in the Temple precincts perhaps reflected his fidelity to the more traditional Jewish idea of what the Temple was all about, which got him into trouble with the Temple’s priests (known at that time for their more accommodating approach to secular society).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">In effect, what Jesus was fighting for in the Temple was Israel’s core national value – faithfulness to God alone, God who had made Israel a nation and given it his Law, transforming a semi-nomadic mob of ex-slaves into an actual nation.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Like that exodus generation, we too are wanderers in life’s desert, desperately in need of direction. We may wander far and wide, with only the vaguest idea at times of where we may be heading. Along the way, however, God has given us the roadmap we require – the familiar one he gave the Israelites in the desert – what Jewish tradition refers to as God’s “10 Words” and which we commonly call his “10 commandments.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The 10 commandments constitute the core of the Law that was God’s gift to his people. The key to understanding the 10 commandments is contained in how God identifies himself in the very 1<span>st </span>commandment: <i>I, the Lord, am your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, that place of slavery. You shall have no other gods besides me.</i> The Lord himself, the Lord who has shown himself to be God by liberating his people, is the rationale for this and every subsequent commandment.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The 10 commandments spell out in daily life the consequences of becoming God’s people. Moral living is our response to God’s covenant with us, our cooperation with the plan God has been pursuing through all of human history – from creation to Christ, from Christmas to the end. In our moral lives we reflect our gratitude to God and our commitment to remain faithful for the long haul.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">According to an ancient legend, at Mount Sinai God made the wombs of all of Israel’s women as clear as glass – so that all future generations could see for themselves what was happening and personally commit to the covenant. I suppose that’s pretty poor biology, but it’s a great image! It makes the important point that the commandments are addressed to each of us individually, which is why they are phrased in the singular. (Those of us above a certain age will certainly remember having learned them in the singular form – “<i>thou</i> shalt … <i>thou</i> shalt not.”). We are all each responsible to respond to God with what we do and the way we live.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">As our road-map through the desert of daily life, the 10 commandments constantly call and challenge us to commitment and fidelity:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- commitment and fidelity, first of all, to God, who has revealed himself to us, above all, in Jesus his Son;<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">- commitment and fidelity to God’s world, which God has entrusted to us and </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif">which we have individually and collectively managed to make such a mess of and done so much damage to;<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- commitment and fidelity to one another, our companion wanderers in the desert, whom we have been commanded to care about and to care for, whether we like it or not, whether we like each other or not, both when war or economic hardships make us more conscious of our shared condition and common need, and in times of peace and prosperity when wealth and security tempt us to go it alone and leave others behind;<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">- commitment and fidelity, finally, to God’s holy Church, by being part of which we are united with one another in Christ’s body, the true and eternal Temple, and become God’s people in this world.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">Commitment is never automatic, and fidelity doesn’t come easily or cheaply – not for the folks at Mount Sinai </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif">(as so many subsequent episodes in Exodus illustrate) and not for anyone else either. But the commandments teach us that the fast food of individual fulfillment and personal autonomy just can’t compare with dining with one another in God’s kingdom.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-family: arial;">For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-family: arial;">Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent, the Cathedral of Saint Andrew, Grand Rapids, MI, Saturday, March 2, 2024.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p>City Fatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17769559147659492086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538477881080991285.post-78845541631649681962024-02-29T08:02:00.000-05:002024-02-29T08:02:57.015-05:00Leap Year<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhToNiFIgUKbDmbWuLAEgfn3BcFmtSnxHx629NCuia9iPAG2qVNdpgMguePFJznF6j4ZWwvyVYo4ym2syAzuRFGm46NAGCb3U8LkI7vXF3uKpEiQ7f_8hsxxJdZWrM2rOf9Ds68vqmFyM9xhFeL32IF1ir5Z_9UCOiy9mhjuJli87XVVqld5J8_dETNSV_-/s2036/leapyear.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2036" data-original-width="2036" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhToNiFIgUKbDmbWuLAEgfn3BcFmtSnxHx629NCuia9iPAG2qVNdpgMguePFJznF6j4ZWwvyVYo4ym2syAzuRFGm46NAGCb3U8LkI7vXF3uKpEiQ7f_8hsxxJdZWrM2rOf9Ds68vqmFyM9xhFeL32IF1ir5Z_9UCOiy9mhjuJli87XVVqld5J8_dETNSV_-/s320/leapyear.webp" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Every fourth year, our otherwise predictable, relatively repetitive civic calendar does something just a little bit different (albeit predictably so), </span><span style="font-family: arial;">which makes me think that today, February 29 - this extra day we have every fourth year, every "Leap Year" - should always be a holiday! (After all, why should labor-extracting employers be given the benefit of an extra day's labor by their employees, just because this happens once every four years?)</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face=""tahoma" , "verdana" , "segoe" , sans-serif">"Leap year," as anyone who cares already knows, was first introduced into the ancient Roman calendar by Julius Caesar in 46 B.C. Originally, Caesar intended a"Leap Year" to occur every fourth year, which was what happened until the introduction of the reformed Gregorian Calendar in October 1582. Caesar's reform, while presumably an infinite improvement over whatever the Romans had been doing with their calendar before, was nonetheless slightly off, so much so that by the 16th century the Julian Calendar was about 10 days off, The Gregorian Calendar, which we now almost universally use, corrected Caesar's calculations by omitting 3 leap years every 400 years - e.g., not adding the extra day in 1700, 1800, and 1900, but doing so in 2000 (As a result, the Julian and Gregorian calendars are now a full 13 days out of sync.)</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face=""tahoma" , "verdana" , "segoe" , sans-serif"><br /></span></span></div><div style="orphans: 2; text-align: justify; widows: 2;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face=""tahoma" , "verdana" , "segoe" , sans-serif">For reasons that made more sense to an ancient Roman than to us</span><span face=""tahoma" , "verdana" , "segoe" , sans-serif">, Caesar inserted the extra "leap year" day in late February - duplicating the sixth day before the Kalends of March, which in the Roman way of computing dates was February 24. </span></span><span style="font-family: arial;">(February 23, the seventh day before the Kalends of March, was the pre-Christian Roman feast of </span><i style="font-family: arial;">Terminalia</i><span style="font-family: arial;">, devoted to Terminus, the god of boundaries, temporal as well as geographical, which may perhaps explain Caesar's choice of the following day.) </span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face=""tahoma" , "verdana" , "segoe" , sans-serif">Hence, the Latin term for "leap year" is </span><i>annus bisextilis,</i><span face=""tahoma" , "verdana" , "segoe" , sans-serif"> i.e., a year in which the sixth day before the Kalends of March occurs twice. This curious </span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white;">term for what in English we call <i>leap year</i> is as a result common in all the Romance languages, for example, “anno bisestile” </span></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">in Italian.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;"> </span><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">In the pre-conciliar Roman liturgical calendar, the sixth day before the Kalends of March, February 24, was celebrated as the feast of Saint Matthias. But in a "leap year," when there were two sixth days before the Kalends of March, Saint Matthias was celebrated on the second of them, February 25. Sadly - and to no noticeable advantage to anyone - the present, post-conciliar calendar reassigned Saint Matthias to May 14. So another quaint survival from liturgical antiquity was gratuitously abandoned.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face=""tahoma" , "verdana" , "segoe" , sans-serif">Be all that as it may, we still have this oddity of "leap year," which gives us a February of 29 instead of 28 days and means that for the next 12 months every date will fall two days of the week later instead of the usual one. (Hence the term "leap year.") </span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face=""tahoma" , "verdana" , "segoe" , sans-serif"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face=""tahoma" , "verdana" , "segoe" , sans-serif">In my ignorant youth, I very foolishly embraced the project of an artificial, invariable "World Calendar." Having long ago recovered from the ultra-rationalist folly underlying the proposed "World Calendar," I can now better appreciate the charm of having so much variety in our actual calendar! (The Second Vatican Council wisely poured cold water on the proposed "World Calendar" with its caveat that, when it comes to any alternative calendar system, </span></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Segoe, sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; orphans: 2; text-align: left; widows: 2;"><i>the Church has no objection only in the case of those systems which retain and safeguard a seven-day week with Sunday, without the introduction of any days outside the week, so that the succession of weeks may be left intact.</i></span><span style="font-family: arial;">)</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face=""tahoma" , "verdana" , "segoe" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""tahoma" , "verdana" , "segoe" , sans-serif">Not surprisingly, all sorts of popular folkloric customs have developed over the centuries in regard to "leap year." There is, for example, the Briti</span><span face=""tahoma" , "verdana" , "segoe" , sans-serif">sh-Irish tradition (dubiously associated with Saint Brigid of Kildare, whose 1500th anniversary has been celebrated this very month) that a woman may take the initiative and propose marriage to a man in "Leap Year." </span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">I don't know what to make of that curious concession in today's very changed society. But I still think this extra day should always be a holiday!</span></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /><br /></span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>City Fatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17769559147659492086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538477881080991285.post-39080930121812202612024-02-27T11:58:00.002-05:002024-02-27T22:01:15.778-05:00Freud's Last Session (The Movie)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin0Vw7D0rcI14lq44X56nME5-PtFdZmrqneU8ghO0DP2iEc1a1a-ZNXxUMe6KVDTjHe7HDArEvvXCpCxU89tSd7M64JIjzwE7g844Mk7O3PYau95d-do5aM0JrPwOrrkfbtAyPOACmkfGdc1qp2QyAldgBx2VH7f7IjJ2w_Gn8-jQ77ynK6v3uTCkkDe2o/s378/Freuds_last_session_poster.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="378" data-original-width="255" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin0Vw7D0rcI14lq44X56nME5-PtFdZmrqneU8ghO0DP2iEc1a1a-ZNXxUMe6KVDTjHe7HDArEvvXCpCxU89tSd7M64JIjzwE7g844Mk7O3PYau95d-do5aM0JrPwOrrkfbtAyPOACmkfGdc1qp2QyAldgBx2VH7f7IjJ2w_Gn8-jQ77ynK6v3uTCkkDe2o/s320/Freuds_last_session_poster.jpg" width="216" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="orphans: 2; text-align: justify; widows: 2;"><span style="font-family: arial;">I used to go to movies much more often. Now I seldom see new films. Finally, however, one 2023 movie which I have been really wanting to see has recently become available for rental via YouTube. <i>Freud's Last Sess</i><i>ion</i>, based on an earlier stage play of the same name, depicts a fictional meeting between the founder of psychoanalysis, Dr. Sigmund Freud (Anthony Hopkins) and author C.S. Lewis (Matthew Goode) on September 3, 1939, the day Britain declared war on Germany, and just 20 days before Freud's own death. </span></p><p style="orphans: 2; text-align: justify; widows: 2;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Dr. Freud, of course, had escaped from Nazi-occupied Vienna a little over a year earlier thanks to the efforts of various friends and allies (notably Dr. <span style="background-color: white; color: #121212; orphans: 2; text-align: left; widows: 2;">Ernest Jones, U.S. Ambassador William Bullitt, and Princess Marie Bonaparte). It is known that </span><span style="background-color: white; orphans: 2; text-align: left; widows: 2;"><span style="color: #202122;">Freud did meet with an unidentified Oxford don near the end of his life. That could possibly have been Lewis. We will likely never know, but the opportunity for this fictionalized account obviously suggests itself. (Given the extent of Friend's then terminal illness, one wonders how vigorous a conversation could have taken place in September 1939, but again this is fiction.</span></span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The storyline of the film is that Freud, a long-term Jewish atheist, and indeed one of modernity's most effective exponents of the case against religion, objected to Lewis' rejection of atheism in favor of Christianity; and so the two met to debate the question of the existence of God. In the course of their discussion, other subjects also arise, among them Lewis' own lingering traumas from his childhood and from World War I. Meanwhile, we also get to meet Freud's famous daughter and child psychologist Anna (Liv Lisa Fries), on whom Freud was very obviously dependent at that point. We also meet her lesbian partner, Dorothy Burlingham (Jodi Balfour), a relationship in constant conflict with Freud's possessive attitude toward his emotionally dependent daughter. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Despite the film's title and its implied emphasis on the debate between the two men, much of the film focuses on Anna and her complicated relationship with her father, who had famously abandoned the canons of psychoanalysis in analyzing his daughter himself.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The opening scenes set the stage in the context of the panicked atmosphere in London on the first official day of war, including an air-raid warning which at one point causes the two men to take refuge in, of all places, a local church, where Freud correctly identifies the statue of Saint Dymphna, patroness of the mentally ill. Otherwise, most of the men's interaction takes place in Freud's London home, within which Anna seems to have done her best to replicate their Vienna home, and which reflects Freud's long-term interest in religious artifacts. Indeed, he describes himself as "a passionate disbeliever, who is obsessed with belief and worship, ancient beliefs and worship, yours [Lewis's] included."</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Freud was, of course, a dying man at this point, which adds further pathos to the story and its seemingly unresolvable debate about God. "Death," Freud acknowledges, "is as unfair as life." Freud's life represented the ideal of scientific rationality, which just cannot make room for religion, no matter how interesting it may find the pre-rational in human existence. Lewis, for his part, asks in exasperation, "Why does religion make room for science, but science refuses to make room for religion." His question remains unanswered, on the screen as in real life.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">In the end, the two men part - presumably as friends. but the religion question remains unresolved, as it perhaps inevitably is in this life. Both men remain essentially unchanged, which may be the film's honesty and its virtue.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-variant-ligatures: normal; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; orphans: 2; padding-bottom: 0.5em; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-variant-ligatures: normal; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; orphans: 2; padding-bottom: 0.5em; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;"><sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-3" style="font-size: 11.2px; line-height: 1; unicode-bidi: isolate; white-space: nowrap;"></sup></p>City Fatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17769559147659492086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538477881080991285.post-56673899036484283002024-02-24T06:37:00.000-05:002024-02-24T06:37:47.716-05:00Two Years of War<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzFAbco0kCTkRq3FiyZ4miewcsQtf2-FL0XBzstsNZLY1tk6zHrurdHamiHZBF6_Vg5J256wKz-1lFz6p2lCoCaoZFK2_xCmmiijhsIABBRZ45XoN25go4EFiC0e5dGe9HwR9aLkSgyfDEa-ZY4aqRzlj3onuezg2juWvEO-S8zAUMG-r0FZCJbIwTa010/s275/Ukraine.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzFAbco0kCTkRq3FiyZ4miewcsQtf2-FL0XBzstsNZLY1tk6zHrurdHamiHZBF6_Vg5J256wKz-1lFz6p2lCoCaoZFK2_xCmmiijhsIABBRZ45XoN25go4EFiC0e5dGe9HwR9aLkSgyfDEa-ZY4aqRzlj3onuezg2juWvEO-S8zAUMG-r0FZCJbIwTa010/s1600/Ukraine.png" width="275" /></a></div><br /><p></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Exactly two years ago today, Russia, under its current Orthodox Tsar Vladimir Putin, launched an imperialist aggressive war against its European neighbor Ukraine - the first such imperialist aggressive war on European territory since 1945. Under the leadership of President Joe Biden, the U.S. and NATO originally responded effectively. Since then, however, MAGA isolationism and a general societal fatigue with "forever wars" have imperiled that response and endangered Ukraine's long-term survival prospects.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">As if a reminder were really needed, the death of Russian dissident Alexei Novalny has further reminded the world what a monster the current Orthodox Tsar actually is - and by extension how serious the threat Putin's Russian imperial expansionism poses in the immediate term for Ukraine and in the longer term for the rest of Europe. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The religious component of the conflict may be too complicated to sort out here. However, there is much to be said for Tim Alberta's observation: </span><span style="font-family: arial;">"Russia wasn’t merely using Christianity to endorse its ambitions. Russia was using Christianity to define its enemies. It was the kind of identitarian programming that presaged some of history’s greatest crimes—and, in the case of Russia’s butchery in Ukraine, it would not have been possible without the blessing of the Church." </span><i style="font-family: arial;">The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism</i><span style="font-family: arial;"> (HarperCollins, p. 236).</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Since 2014, Ukraine has lost about 18% of its territory to Russia's imperialism (about 7% before the current war and about 11% more since this war began). In this terrible two-year war, some 130,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed, or wounded, or are missing. Meanwhile, some 10,000 Ukrainian civilians have also been killed and some 25% of the population has been displaced. While Ukraine has never really been "winning" the war, there was a time when it looked at least as if Ukraine were on the offensive. Now that illusion has been dispelled - as may be the illusion that the United States is a reliable ally, After delaying four four full months the President's request for military aid to Ukraine, Congress has taken two-week vacation. So much for any sense of urgency about the government's business!</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">In the "second-guessing" game that inevitably follows any major conflict, it may well be that the Biden Administration has been too slow in supplying needed weaponry to Ukraine out of (possibly reasonable, possible misplaced) fear that Ukraine might use the weapons against Russian territory and thus "escalate" the war. Whatever the reasoning was, a mistake may thus have been made in the pace of American military aid. (To be fair, of course, there was reasonable doubt at first that Ukraine could resist effectively. There would have been no purpose sending large amounts of weaponry, only to have it fall into Russian hands. However, Ukraine's willingness and ability to resist were quickly established. And taking the conflict to Russia's homeland was a wise strategy, at least from he Ukrainian perspective, regardless of American nervousness about "escalation.")</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">What the Biden Administration did do very well was to mobilize European support behind the defense of Ukraine. Europeans, having frittered away the post Cold War "peace dividend" and having for far too long relied too much on the U.S. defensive umbrella, were finally fully awakened to the degree of threat posed by Russian imperialism. Russia's neighbors - Sweden, Finland, the Baltic States, Poland) know from their long history what a dangerous enemy Russia inevitably is. So their awakening seems to have been more complete and effective. Of all of this war's ironies, Putin's goal of undermining NATO led instead to Sweden and Finland joining NATO and the overall strengthening of that indispensable alliance.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The problem now is not Europe but the U.S. - more precisely the Trump MAGA dominance of American politics and stranglehold over Congress. Thanks to Trump's envious admiration of Putin and his hostility to NATO and thanks to the slavish subservience of the Speaker and his Caucus to Trump, the U.S. may be on the verge of an irresponsible abandonment of its international obligations analogous to its abandonment of its international obligations after World War I. And we well remember how that story ended!</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><div> </div></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>City Fatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17769559147659492086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538477881080991285.post-65016831236076516652024-02-22T05:57:00.000-05:002024-02-22T05:57:52.996-05:00The Church's Rock<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxjABn3fLNjtJrzFzYVZy9psbX8OdU9a_maRxJ8NAaopV3zrFuduhKSOEDyjaJleElMjokiKfxqwUs_3tKo51Ooyo4gpOWsp2CIjyDy8SYvuk1ASNq0ElLgPfn1re6EI_4DPrF37tpTOVdzTxnahQnYLFZnPJF_yZTi5f3xsT02iV6hrTBbPOr9GRLpplH/s160/Papal%20arms.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="160" data-original-width="160" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxjABn3fLNjtJrzFzYVZy9psbX8OdU9a_maRxJ8NAaopV3zrFuduhKSOEDyjaJleElMjokiKfxqwUs_3tKo51Ooyo4gpOWsp2CIjyDy8SYvuk1ASNq0ElLgPfn1re6EI_4DPrF37tpTOVdzTxnahQnYLFZnPJF_yZTi5f3xsT02iV6hrTBbPOr9GRLpplH/s1600/Papal%20arms.png" width="160" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Among the many wonderful things which one can watch nowadays on YouTube, there is a series of videos from the Italian TV coverage of the coronation of Pope Saint John XXIII on November 4, 1958. Several times during that lengthy ceremony, the choir chants Jesus’ words which we just heard in today’s Gospel: <i>Tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam</i> (“You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church”). Also, that Gospel account was chanted, not once but twice – first by a Latin deacon, and then by a Greek deacon. I think that’s what is called making a point!<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Today’s feast and its Gospel take us back in time - from the baroque splendor of St. Peter’s Basilica and the modern papacy to <i>the region of Caesarea Philippi</i> and to Peter himself. Caesarea Philippi was situated some 20 miles north of the Sea of Galilee in territory ruled by King Herod’s son Philip, hence the name. That place is now known as "Banias," a deformation of its pre-Roman name, "Paneas," referring to the Greek god Pan. At the time of Jesus, a fertility cult was thriving in the pagan temple to Pan at this location at Israel’s northern border at the foot of Mount Hermon. That border was obviously a lot easier to cross in Jesus’ time, than it is now; but it was still a border, laden with symbolic spiritual significance. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">It was to that faraway, pagan place that Jesus took his disciples and asked them what is, in some sense, still the basic Christian question: Who do you say that Jesus is? As befits the prominent role he is being prepared for, Peter answers on behalf of the disciples – on behalf of the entire Church: <i>You are the Christ, </i>the Messiah, the Anointed One<i>, the Son of the living God. </i>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 <i>the Son of the living</i> (that is, the one true) <i>God</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Then, as now, Peter speaks for the Church –for all of us. In response, Jesus assures us that Peter’s profession of faith is not just another opinion, one option among many in the global religious marketplace, but a revelation from God – one which Peter himself still probably at best only poorly understood. 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. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Fast forward to the baroque basilica built above Peter’s tomb, where Peter continues to speak - on the Church’s behalf for the sake of the whole world. In a Church that right now, as so often in her past, seems much more divided than united, the papal office continues to serve as a visible source of the unity of the Church 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,” we “may stand forth,” as a Universal Church, “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 <i>the Christ, the Son of the living God,</i> whose own victory over death has definitively guaranteed that <i>the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against</i> the Church.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><i><span style="font-family: arial;">Homily for the </span></i></o:p><i><span style="font-family: arial;">Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter, Cathedral of Saint Andrew, Grand Rapids, MI, February 22, 2024.</span></i></p>City Fatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17769559147659492086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538477881080991285.post-12116599934598563032024-02-19T06:57:00.000-05:002024-02-19T06:57:07.386-05:00Our Ongoing National Nightmare<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3d8CIRXmp_1kvWiJATjuLwbLI9o-VV-2OULvQsVBkqgVSthpvU7JzDE7lrb47GX5p3OqalL8_aVt6OhJ8dxWDQjw5USBj6_a4HRFB6lJSFISOYbP7At9UYbE6ewcP8YhodUjNlcK18M7HfqwNf7G7H6ovTLWuO68nMMPVlO29T8g5akSaK8vHfcVxdgbB/s3334/Gilbert_Stuart_George_Washington_Lansdowne_portrait_1796.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3334" data-original-width="2076" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3d8CIRXmp_1kvWiJATjuLwbLI9o-VV-2OULvQsVBkqgVSthpvU7JzDE7lrb47GX5p3OqalL8_aVt6OhJ8dxWDQjw5USBj6_a4HRFB6lJSFISOYbP7At9UYbE6ewcP8YhodUjNlcK18M7HfqwNf7G7H6ovTLWuO68nMMPVlO29T8g5akSaK8vHfcVxdgbB/s320/Gilbert_Stuart_George_Washington_Lansdowne_portrait_1796.jpg" width="199" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Today is "Presidents Day" - as good an occasion as any perhaps to reflect upon our ongoing national nightmare. Way back when (in the mid-1970s) - during our last "long national nightmare" (i.e., Watergate) - one of my Princeton professors wrote, "How did we get from the <i>Federalist Papers</i> to the <i>Edited Transcripts</i>?" On this Presidents Day, we may likewise wonder: How did we get from Washington to Trump? How did we get from Adams vs. Jefferson to Biden vs. Trump? How did we get from Federalists vs. Anti-Federalists to Democrats vs. MAGA?</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Despite its popular name, "Presidents Day" is not a celebration of the presidency. In fact, "Presidents Day" doesn't really exist - except in the fevered swamp of American capitalism, where it is February's analogue to November's Black Friday. Legally, "Presidents Day" is really still <i>Washington's Birthday</i>. Since February 22 (Washington's actual birthday in the Gregorian calendar in 1732) became a federal holiday in 1879, George Washington has been the only president honored with such a holiday. However, in one more obvious sign of the misplaced priorities which characterize our contemporary our society, the <i>Uniform Monday Holiday Act</i> of 1968 considered the creation three-day weekends more important that the historical and cultural meaning of holidays like Washington's Birthday, Memorial Day, and Columbus Day.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #363636; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;">Meanwhile, as if pretending it were still a serious organization, the Senate, </span></span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(54, 54, 54); color: #363636; font-family: arial; orphans: 2; text-align: left; widows: 2;">every year since 1896,</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #363636; font-family: arial; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;"> has deputed one of its members </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #363636; font-family: arial; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;">to read out loud Washington’s 7,640-word farewell address. Last year, Senator James Lankford, an arch-conservative Republican Senator from Oklahoma, since then now apparently a <i>persona non grata</i> in MAGA circles for actually being willing to try to govern, read the address. Of course, Congress, as if it were oblivious to the multiple crises confronting our country and our world, any number of which are being exacerbated by congressional malfeasance, has gone on vacation. So the ritual reading of Washington's Address will have to wait a while!</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #363636; font-family: arial; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #363636; font-family: arial; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;">All of which, while obviously trivial in itself, seems somehow symbolic of the sad state of our politics and society. The relationship is reciprocal. Our deranged politics unhinges our society. And our increasingly unhinged society stimulates the derangement of our politics.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #363636; font-family: arial; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;"> </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>City Fatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17769559147659492086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538477881080991285.post-12524614895182169762024-02-18T10:27:00.000-05:002024-02-18T10:27:01.724-05:00The Kingdom Is At Hand<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEsAIF_wFU_RxXuaxkC2Rasj8Uk7o5o8rAYNyff9HNIjaoQZ0EDoEmzS9niVqTI2aoBif87obfsl9WFg1b3NFo-eVwpyXv8_k0dxZ6eapQR7zsjHiBTHVtDlrko2Tl1TOHQ5mMqcprjxg0Rp8OyaVv-3D47cuNWY1j48r4O4ZuIyyjLs5XyfOntzgMnXZj/s5712/IMG_2016.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4284" data-original-width="5712" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEsAIF_wFU_RxXuaxkC2Rasj8Uk7o5o8rAYNyff9HNIjaoQZ0EDoEmzS9niVqTI2aoBif87obfsl9WFg1b3NFo-eVwpyXv8_k0dxZ6eapQR7zsjHiBTHVtDlrko2Tl1TOHQ5mMqcprjxg0Rp8OyaVv-3D47cuNWY1j48r4O4ZuIyyjLs5XyfOntzgMnXZj/s320/IMG_2016.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">How many here showed up for ashes this past Wednesday? I’ll bet almost all of us - and a lot of others besides, people we may seldom even see on other days! It has to be one of the great examples of the Church’s liturgical genius that it can take something so unattractive (but so true) as our inevitable return to dust, and ritualize it so effectively every Lent.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Now back when Lent really was exactly 40 days (before Ash Wednesday and the 3 following days got added on), Lent began on this Sunday, and the 40 days are in fact still counted beginning with today.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">So, every year on this day, we are invited to begin our Lent the way Jesus began his public life and mission – not in flamboyant miracles, exciting accomplishments, and public acclaim, but in the threatening silence and solitude of the desert. The Judean desert is a harsh and somewhat forbidding place – hot and sunny by day, cold and dark by night, silent as death. That was where Jesus made his Lent and where he invites us (symbolically at least) to join him for ours. Every Lent, the same Spirit that <i>drove Jesus out into the desert</i>leads us to spend these 40 days with him <i>among the wild beasts</i> that threaten and challenge us to choose what to make of our lives.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">According to the biblical account of human origins, Adam had originally lived peacefully among those same wild beasts – his food provided, according to Jewish legend, by angels. Jesus’ sojourn <i>among the wild beasts</i> with <i>angels ministering to him</i>, tells us that God’s original plan is still in place – despite whatever obstacles we put in his way. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">That’s the point of the story of Noah. Despite all the obstacles people put in God’s way, in his mercy <i>God patiently waited during the building of the ark, in which a few persons, eight in all, were saved</i>. God then went even further and made a covenant of mercy and forgiveness with Noah and his descendants, restraining his just anger, to guarantee the continuance of life on earth.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">In Jesus, however, God does more than just restrain his anger. He actually <u>un</u>does the damage done by human sinfulness, descending into the prison of death to free its victims. Jesus’ descent among the dead anticipates the final fulfillment of his mission: <i>“The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.”<o:p></o:p></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">That’s what Lent is all about because that’s what life is ultimately all about. One Ash Wednesday some years ago, I overheard someone explaining Lent as “a time to get connected with ourselves.” Well, Lent is a time to renew ourselves. But we do that by focusing not on ourselves, but on the big picture, and where we want to be in that picture. Lent is our special time to connect with Christ – Christ tempted in the desert and victorious on the cross, Christ descended among the dead and risen at the right hand of his Father – and to allow that experience, his experience to make a real difference in our lives, because <i>the kingdom of God</i> really is <i>at hand</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>Homily for the First Sunday of Lent, Cathedral of Saint Andrew, Grand Rapids, MI, February 18, 2024.</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></p>City Fatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17769559147659492086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538477881080991285.post-36081190495518510622024-02-16T09:21:00.000-05:002024-02-16T09:21:19.488-05:00Her Emails - Again?<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpLInIAjdXDdN5UZth0Ssi_1UcHgDP2Xi0dDSkYLrzKswEI5F9PgdY0Evw7FcOnO3-sDs8qCcV7hDDZK6GLtwwu5NB9LHcc4-h3PLZD2uKT0OvXlpmxbJ7ZrVfTdmgXjGC-xr5mjVZflaxuTBVFHNusTYcNImljtwROeIUWZy8t2SICYsZgE4jlARGMT31/s277/Vote%202024.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="156" data-original-width="277" height="156" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpLInIAjdXDdN5UZth0Ssi_1UcHgDP2Xi0dDSkYLrzKswEI5F9PgdY0Evw7FcOnO3-sDs8qCcV7hDDZK6GLtwwu5NB9LHcc4-h3PLZD2uKT0OvXlpmxbJ7ZrVfTdmgXjGC-xr5mjVZflaxuTBVFHNusTYcNImljtwROeIUWZy8t2SICYsZgE4jlARGMT31/s1600/Vote%202024.png" width="277" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Eight years ago, the U.S. electorate was asked to choose between a predictable, neo-liberal, internationalist Democrat and a pseudo-populist, neo-isolationist demagogue. And so, to help voters in their discernment, mainstream media endlessly obsessed about the Democratic candidate's emails. There were, in fact, many issues worth debating in 2016. If, however, the proverbial visitor from Mars had been dropped to earth for the election, he or she might well have concluded that the single most important issue - and without doubt the most serious challenge facing the United States that year - was Hillary Clinton's emails.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">And now media coverage is doing it again. This time it is not Hillary's emails but President Joe Biden's age, which is the media's fixation. Forget that Biden's opponent in the election is just a few years younger and if elected will also be in his 80s by the end of his term. Forget too the Biden, whatever his physical frailties, has governed like a normal president (and actually governed quite competently and successfully), while his opponent sounds increasingly unhinged and is facing four trials for 91 criminal indictments. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Media malfeasance undoubtedly helped elect Donald Trump in 2016, and may well do it again in 2024. That said, that is the political universe which we inhabit at present. Somehow or other, Biden and the Democrats must defuse the age issue in some way and get on with the campaign.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Perhaps, in an ideal world Biden would have been satisfied with one term, as some supporters may have hoped he would back in 2020. The problem with that, of course, is that, in American politics, a one-term president is inevitably remembered as a failure. History may treat George H.W. Bush better than his contemporaries did, but that is no compensation for being remembered first and foremost for having lost re-election. It is hard enough, if you are the sort of person who has spent much of your life imagining <i>Hail To the Chief </i>was composed just for you, to choose not to run again. It is even harder to do so knowing that any such decision would be interpreted as a sign of weakness, a harbinger of historical failure.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Perhaps, Biden could have gotten away with it if he had declined to run in the immediate aftermath of the 2022 midterm election, in which the Democrats did very well. (Had the Democrats done badly, as had been expected, there might have been more pressure on Biden to withdraw, and any such withdrawal would almost certainly have been seen as an acknowledgement of failure.)</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">And, perhaps, Biden will follow Ross Douthat's recommendation and announce his withdrawal at or just before the Convention and throw the Convention open to choose the party's candidate. While it might be nice to see the Convention reclaim its historical role, that would be a scenario at least as risky in terms of defeating Donald Trump as Joe Biden's running against him. And, however attractive Douthat's scenario of an open convention, it remains extremely unlikely that Biden will actually do it - or that many in the party would really want to sail out into such uncharted waters. After all, it is not the case that there is any obvious alternative for the party to rally around, whose electoral prospects appear any better than Biden's. (That, of course, highlights a larger problem in American politics of a lack of obvious heirs to replace the current ruling gerontocracy.)</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">So, in the real word in which we live, Joe Biden will be the candidate of his party, and the fact that he is old must simply be factored in - like Hillary's emails in 2016 - as an unfair burden to be borne by the campaign. (Hopefully, however, with a less spectacularly catastrophic outcome!)</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">It has been suggested by some that maybe some of the (artificially inflated) anxiety about President Biden's age is symbolic of other concerns, in particular the sense that Biden represents - and is overly wedded to - a 20th-century style of politics, which may have made sense when Biden entered the Senate 50 years ago but which no longer describes the way Washington and political parties work now. There is some truth to that, of course. I certainly think Hakeem Jeffries may have a better appreciation of the full meaning of Republican MAGA intransigence than Biden does. On the other hand, Biden has accomplished a great deal - perhaps more than any president since LBJ. If only that message were as interesting as his emails (I mean, his age)!</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Underlying all this is the perennial problem that, whereas Democrats really want to fall in love, Republicans are more ready to fall in line. There are still some less than fully MAGA Republicans around, most of whom, however, will faithfully endorse Donald Trump by Election Day, if they have not done so already. On the other hand, disgruntled Democrats are a common occurrence and appear perennially prepared to imperil their candidate's and their party's prospects by attacking their own leadership instead of attacking the opposition. And the Democratic coalition is basically looser and harder to hold together against the bizarre attractiveness of third-party candidates or the seemingly greater satisfaction of staying home rather than voting at all. <b>Republicans are just better at supporting their candidates and their party than Democrats are. And, if the Republicans win again this year, that may well be the main reason why.</b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><p></p>City Fatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17769559147659492086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538477881080991285.post-55662860249586892152024-02-15T07:37:00.000-05:002024-02-15T07:37:56.201-05:00Getting "On With It"<p style="text-align: justify;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwC4xcgSgWf7ZOYZCkCdsMWhwSVjfy6rcpLpTTZVGaoexlPUEavc6LBCKXetG7N1ZnrW41uDhycirTBrBo-ata7xbQWhh8plX6rSGc0laBliJT1-YgIRNVnmlrjiREPuyFuJFKg2Bc8jt6Dy1osA23WmX9WDdSeNCn14PNhdi_el7RtyHBWrNhdrixYT1G/s505/1947.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="505" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwC4xcgSgWf7ZOYZCkCdsMWhwSVjfy6rcpLpTTZVGaoexlPUEavc6LBCKXetG7N1ZnrW41uDhycirTBrBo-ata7xbQWhh8plX6rSGc0laBliJT1-YgIRNVnmlrjiREPuyFuJFKg2Bc8jt6Dy1osA23WmX9WDdSeNCn14PNhdi_el7RtyHBWrNhdrixYT1G/s320/1947.jpeg" width="253" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Seventy-seven years ago, on February 15, 1947, my parents, Felix Franco and Camille Bonaccorso (<i>photo</i>), were married at a Saturday morning nuptial Mass at Saint Nicholas of Tolentione Church in what was then justifiably called "the Beautiful Bronx." There is a wonderful scene in the final season of <i>The Crown, </i>the acclaimed <i>Netflix </i>series about my parents' contemporary (albeit a few years younger than either of them) Queen Elizabeth II, in which the Queen responds to her grandson Prince William's anxieties about dating, "We met someone, then married them, and got on with it" (season 6, episode 7).</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Like so many of the Queen's wise words in <i>The Crown</i>, that sentence effectively expresses my parents' generation's expectations and experience. The "Greatest Generation," as they were so rightly labelled by </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Tom Brokaw, experienced unique historical challenges in war and peace. Having won the war and brought home what President John F. Kennedy would later call "a hard and bitter peace," they were ready to do what generation after generation had done for all of human history - meet someone, marry, and get "on with it." And that they did, producing the famous "Baby Boom" generation, of which I am proudly a member.</span></p><p style="orphans: 2; text-align: justify; widows: 2;"><span style="font-family: arial;">It is no secret that, since then, something has gone amiss when it comes to the basic business of family formation - getting "on with it." Some other countries are even worse off than the U.S., but the entire developed world seems to have been afflicted. It is not yet quite the biological catastrophe that British author P.D. James described so poignantly in <i>The Children of Men, </i>her 1992 <span style="background-color: white; color: #040c28; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;">dystopian novel s</span><span style="background-color: white; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;"><span style="color: #202124;">et in England in 2021, which <span style="caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 36);">frankly</span> portrays the tragic results of mass infertility, a world without a future, a world without hope.</span></span></span></p><p style="orphans: auto; text-align: justify; widows: auto;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;"><span style="color: #202124;">We're not there yet, of course, but James' depressing depiction of what happens when, for whatever reason, the continuation of the human race has seemingly ceased, is a profound warning to all of us of where we seem to be heading. Unsurprisingly it seems to be commentators of a more conservative </span></span></span><span style="color: #202124; font-family: arial;">orientation who seem most alert to this crisis in humanity's future. Among conservative pundits, Ross Douthat of <i>The New York Times</i> has been particularly eloquent in highlighting this issue and the catastrophic <span style="caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 36);">prospects it portends for our world.</span></span></p><p style="orphans: auto; text-align: justify; widows: auto;"><span style="color: #202124; font-family: arial;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 36);">On the other hand, as <i>The Atlantic</i>'s </span></span><a class="ArticleBylines_link__kNP4C" data-action="click author - byline" data-event-element="author" data-flatplan-author-link="true" data-label="https://www.theatlantic.com/author/brad-wilcox/" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/author/brad-wilcox/" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: black; font-family: arial; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; widows: 2;">Brad Wilcox</a><span style="orphans: 2; text-align: left; widows: 2;">, </span><span style="font-family: arial; orphans: 2; text-align: left; widows: 2;">"The Awfulness of Elite Hypocrisy on Marriage" has recently written, </span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">“Social media, meanwhile, tends to send bad signals to kids and young adults. The dopamine-driven ethos that infuses much of TikTok and Instagram enriches the executives at Sequoia Capital and Meta but provides little support for anything but living for the moment, and undercuts the values and behaviors needed to sustain</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif"> long-term love</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif">, not to mention marriage</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif">." Meanwhile, more traditional media, Wilcox notes, "</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif">oscillate between occasionally acknowledging the benefits of marriage and frequently praising</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif"> the alternatives to it." </span></span></p><p style="orphans: auto; text-align: justify; widows: auto;"><span style="color: #202124; font-family: arial;">At their wedding, 77 years ago today, my parents would have listened as the celebrating priest read the <i>Rituale Romanum</i>'s "Exhortation before Marriage," one of the treasures of the pre-conciliar liturgy and one of the most beautiful English-language liturgical texts ever composed - now sadly lost from the marriage rite at a time when perhaps its message may be more necessary than ever. That "Exhortation" famously began:</span></p><p style="orphans: auto; text-align: justify; widows: auto;"><span style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>My dear friends: You are about to enter upon a union which is most sacred and most serious. It is most sacred, because established by God himself. By it, he gave to man a share in the greatest work of creation, the work of the continuation of the human race. And in this way he sanctified human love and enabled man and woman to help each other live as children of God, by sharing a common life under his fatherly care. Because God himself is thus its author, marriage is of its very nature a holy institution, requiring of those who enter into it a complete and unreserved giving of self. </i></span></span></p><p style="orphans: auto; text-align: justify; widows: auto;"><span style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Then, after a brief excursus on the specifically <i>sacramental</i> character of <i>Christian</i> marriage, the "Exhortation" continued:</span></span></p><p style="orphans: auto; text-align: justify; widows: auto;"><span style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>This union, then, is most serious, because it will bind you together for life in a relationship so close and so intimate, that it will profoundly influence your whole future, That future, with its hopes and disappointments, its successes and its failures, its pleasures and its pains, its joys </i></span></span><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>and its sorrows, is hidden from your eyes. You know that these elements are mingled in every life, and are to be expected in your own. And so not knowing what is before you, you take each other for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death. </i></span></span></p><p style="orphans: auto; text-align: justify; widows: auto;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;">I wasn't there, of course, when my parents listened to those words. Yet, I myself heard them many times as a child, when I served at weddings as an altar boy. I still particularly remember remember certain sentences which especially impressed me: </span></span><span style="text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-family: arial;">Sacrifice is usually difficult and irksome. Only love can make it easy, and perfect love can make it a joy. We are willing to give in proportion as we love. And when love is perfect, the sacrifice is complete.</span></i></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;">I knew, of course that my parents weren't </span></span><span style="font-family: arial;">perfect. I assumed that only television families like those on <i>Ozzie and Harriet</i> and <i>Father Knows Best </i>were perfect. In fact, like any child, I was acutely aware of what I perceived to be the imperfections in our family life. Yet I also learned to appreciate the struggle to approximate that perfection of love ,which is the key to all human striving and the ultimate aspiration of all moral living.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">That extremely sensible and wise "Exhortation" ended:</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>No greater blessing can come to your married life than pure conjugal love, loyal and true to the end. May, then, this love with which you join your hands and hearts today never fail, but grow deeper and stronger as the years go on. And if true love and the unselfish spirit of perfect sacrifice guide your every action, you can expect the greatest measure of earthly happiness that may be allotted to man in this vale of tears. The rest is in the hands of God. Nor will God be wanting to your needs, he will pledge you the life-long support of his graces in the Holy Sacrament which you are now going to receive.</i></span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Leo Tolstoy famously wrote <span style="color: #202124;"><span style="background-color: white;">at the beginning of his novel <i>Anna Karenina</i>: </span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202124; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;">"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Tolstoy did not know about television </span></span><span style="color: #202124; font-family: arial;">families, which (at least in my childhood days) really were <i>happy families all happy alike</i>. Off television, in this vale of tears, it seems <i>every family is unhappy in its own way</i>. But hands and hearts joined in true love and unselfish spirit transform the ordinary challenges of family life into opportunities of grace. I think of one former classmate of mine who, after his first child was born, told me his respect for the human race had greatly grown now that he more fully understood the challenges men and women undertake to keep the human race going, what <i>The Crown</i>'s Queen Elizabeth would have called getting "on with it."</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #202124; font-family: arial;">I recall with special personal gratitude the commitment my parents made 77 years ago today to get on with the business of keeping the human race going, I honor them and all the other striving parents I have known, and I pray that their example will rekindle in today's world that necessary commitment to marriage and family formation.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #202124; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #202124; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #202124; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: normal; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px auto 30px; max-width: 665px; orphans: 2; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><div class="ArticleHero_title__PQ4pC" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: normal; margin: 0px 0px 18px; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;"><h1 class="ArticleTitle_root__VrZaG" data-flatplan-title="true" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 400; line-height: 52px; margin: 0px 0px 18px;"><br /></h1></div><div class="ArticleHero_dek__EqdkK" data-flatplan-description="true" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: normal; margin: 0px 0px 18px; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;"><p class="ArticleDek_root__P3leE" style="box-sizing: inherit; flex-basis: 100%; line-height: 32px; margin: 0px auto;"><br /></p></div><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: normal; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px auto 30px; max-width: 665px; orphans: 2; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;"><br /></p>City Fatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17769559147659492086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538477881080991285.post-28830432786090468062024-02-14T10:31:00.000-05:002024-02-14T10:31:08.824-05:00Remember ... <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-KClmXurSZYylE2aTkYODokKMZWSRIV3qXtFdu8Oe9Pd1_iIfXKYuoA79LjUETZbYNy7w6gx6iIey9jkFhdiB7QaNe6yKsIiihlRjZQA3SV_BchT527t3j6RuR9uAHbHmfAmcfSWk1OHZRlg2XnqENp7QDxNvXAMtMhkcJiDwxxch9zC4SLjMFYrhqDTi/s5712/IMG_2012.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="5712" data-original-width="4284" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-KClmXurSZYylE2aTkYODokKMZWSRIV3qXtFdu8Oe9Pd1_iIfXKYuoA79LjUETZbYNy7w6gx6iIey9jkFhdiB7QaNe6yKsIiihlRjZQA3SV_BchT527t3j6RuR9uAHbHmfAmcfSWk1OHZRlg2XnqENp7QDxNvXAMtMhkcJiDwxxch9zC4SLjMFYrhqDTi/s320/IMG_2012.jpeg" width="240" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><i><span face="Arial, sans-serif">There is no island, no continent, no city or nation, no distant corner of the globe, where the proclamation of Lenten Fast is not listened to. Armies on the march and travelers on the road, sailors as well as merchants, all alike hear the announcement and receive it with joy. Let no one then separate himself from the number of those fasting, in which every race of humankind, every period of life, every class of society is included.</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">So said Saint Basil the Great </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;">(330-379)</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif"> preaching about Lent in the 4th century, at a time when the Lenten Fast was much more rigorous than it is today. Basil didn’t mention Ash Wednesday - because Ash Wednesday didn’t exist yet. The custom of everybody flocking to church to get ashes was a relative latecomer to Lent. But, unlike the fast, it has survived – and thrived. It seems almost everyone wants ashes on Ash Wednesday. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">For many who come to get ashes today, it is a deeply, religiously spiritual experience. For others, who can even guess what multitude of complex meanings and imaginings this curious custom may have? On the other hand, who can deny the power of God's grace that must surely be at work in drawing so many to church to get those much-desired ashes?</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="color: #333333;">The use of ashes, the Church reminds us, “symbolizes fragility and mortality, and the need to be redeemed by the mercy of God.” <i>Remember</i>, the Church tells us today, <i>that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.</i> What is it about having dirt smudged on one’s face and being reminded that we are going to die that is so amazingly attractive – and on Valentine’s Day, no less?</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="color: #333333;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">Every year, I ask myself that question, and I always come up with the same answer: because it is true. In this “information age” when we are all bombarded on all sides with words and images we can barely begin to process, in this politicized age of “alternative facts” and just plain old-fashioned lies, for once we are being told something that is simply, unambiguously TRUE.</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">We live in a therapeutic age which prizes comfort and feeling good about ourselves. Yet somehow, Ash Wednesday - with its sobering message of the reality of human limits and its solemn challenge to repent - somehow still cuts through the poisonous political platitudes and psychobabble of our age to speak spiritual truth against the powerful lies that envelope us.</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">Today, the Church invites us to break our routine and do something we usually seem somewhat reluctant to do – to take an honest and critical look at ourselves - at where we are, where we are going, where we would like to be going, and how hope to get there.</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><i><span face="Arial, sans-serif">Homily for Ash Wednesday, Cathedral of Saint Andrew, Grand Rapids, MI, February 14, 2021.</span></i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;"><o:p> </o:p></p>City Fatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17769559147659492086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538477881080991285.post-73510803070062862932024-02-13T16:19:00.004-05:002024-02-13T16:58:14.312-05:00Valentine's Day (Anticipated)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEdU3dycmMccQlohrryuhqz-ermgxV0P3doJ4nmV2xZIp3xWDoNFghC-RIY1Y41WuwjZu576hupJYnWOXYzn1Wt3v4FLx6lj5cBXgFLAVg09O0E9PKah-_tCVQ3K4yweDZMg7uh3P_rp8G2kOv5sSZ_m0KOPwPO2ec1NpIvAm4dlzNmw-RXy9Ax6CODuLK/s171/Valentine.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="148" data-original-width="171" height="148" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEdU3dycmMccQlohrryuhqz-ermgxV0P3doJ4nmV2xZIp3xWDoNFghC-RIY1Y41WuwjZu576hupJYnWOXYzn1Wt3v4FLx6lj5cBXgFLAVg09O0E9PKah-_tCVQ3K4yweDZMg7uh3P_rp8G2kOv5sSZ_m0KOPwPO2ec1NpIvAm4dlzNmw-RXy9Ax6CODuLK/s1600/Valentine.jpeg" width="171" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Ash Wednesday's modern popularity is so strong that it has spread well beyond its originally Roman Catholic context. So this year's inconvenient coincidence of Ash Wednesday and Valentine's Day has sparked a surprising amount of even secular commentary. Of course, in my line of work, Valentine's Day has no place. The post-conciliar Roman calendar having ridiculously removed the celebration of Saint Valentine himself, I have no obligation to take any notice of the occasion at all. So I am at most a passive spectator in the debate about how best to celebrate Valentine's Day this year. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Given today's long tradition as a day of feasting - <i>Carnevale, Mardi Gras</i> - it would seem sensible, for those who care about Valentine's Day, to anticipate their celebrations today. That certainly seems more appropriate than the alternative of postponing it to Thursday, which is, after all, the second day of Lent, which is <b>a six-week season</b> <b>of penance</b>, not a single day of ashes. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Anyway, I hope those to whom this holiday applies are able to do it the justice they undoubtedly feel it deserves. And, while perhaps under more normal conditions I might not care that much, nothing is normal anymore, and this year I am aware of at least one additional reason to give at least two cheers for Valentine's Day.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Patriarch Kiril, the Russian Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow and thus Vladimir Putin's spiritual cheerleader in his war of aggression against Ukraine and Western civilization, has added Valentine's Day to his list of enemies. </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;">“The celebration of the so-called ‘Valentine’s Day,’ imported from the West, also raises many questions,” Kiril claims. “Despite all attempts to ennoble it,” Kiril says that Valentine’s Day “still remains propaganda of relationships that have nothing to do with true love.”</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">So take that, you romantic couples, friendship-celebrating school children, and everyone else who enjoys the holiday - not to mention the florists and </span></span><span face="Arial, sans-serif">chocolate sellers who profit so handsomely from it! Now that Putin's chaplain has weighed in, will MAGA world be far behind? After all, </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif">MAGA world</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif"> has already gone to war against romance in its insane response to Taylor and Travis. Perhaps the whole romance-related industry is also some deep-state, pro-Biden, anti-Putin plot that needs to be attacked too?</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial;">Assuming that is not the case, to all who choose to celebrate it today: </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><b><i><span style="color: red; font-family: arial;">Happy Valentine's Day!</span></i></b></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 15pt; text-align: justify;"><span face="-webkit-standard, serif" style="font-family: arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-variant-ligatures: normal; line-height: 26px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; orphans: 2; outline: currentcolor; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;"><br /></p>City Fatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17769559147659492086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538477881080991285.post-65942735989203550082024-02-11T07:37:00.000-05:002024-02-11T07:37:15.737-05:00"If You Wish ..."<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNYqHT2eEKiAJwzzKJKbU5dl_i3Gx6kdyrML89Gf5ClyGRSktmQbmJnyV4L2ZU0Iwvq_66FvPO0-D2E4B-gTExecq9efL9aSyILFfRQnQScJCtT5Z2BwS_WSsp9ZG8L5brfdpkZSQO2gfcPerh8_HtHFWP9SWZT8FEfvawE1wIP1jbBPKLoGYtiHLmXQeZ/s5712/IMG_2007.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4284" data-original-width="5712" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNYqHT2eEKiAJwzzKJKbU5dl_i3Gx6kdyrML89Gf5ClyGRSktmQbmJnyV4L2ZU0Iwvq_66FvPO0-D2E4B-gTExecq9efL9aSyILFfRQnQScJCtT5Z2BwS_WSsp9ZG8L5brfdpkZSQO2gfcPerh8_HtHFWP9SWZT8FEfvawE1wIP1jbBPKLoGYtiHLmXQeZ/s320/IMG_2007.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial;">All of us here have lived through and remember the covid pandemic of 2020, especially those early weeks when, almost overnight everything closed down – schools, stores, even churches. And we were washing our hands all the time and keeping our distance from one another. Some of these emergency measures made sense, some didn’t. I was a pastor in Knoxville, TN, at the time, and I remember leaving the mail out in the sun on the porch for several hours for the sunlight to kill the virus, at a time when even touching the mail was thought by some to be dangerous.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">Recalling all that should help us appreciate the anxiety ancient people felt when faced with the mysterious disease that they called leprosy. Hence, the Old Testament’s extensive instructions on how to deal with it, some of which we just heard in today’s 1<span style="font-size: x-small;">st</span> reading <span style="font-size: x-small;">[</span></span><span style="text-align: left;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Leviticus 13:1-2, 44-46]</span></span></span><span face="Arial, sans-serif">.</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif"> </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif"> </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif">Generally speaking, those suffering from the disease were segregated by law and required to live outside inhabited communities. And, since the disease was widely believed to be very contagious, they were supposed to warn away anyone who approached them. Until 1969, the United Sates had a similar system of legally enforced segregation of lepers in Hawaii – made famous for generations of Catholic school children by the heroic stories of Saint Damien of Molokai, whose statue stands in the U.S. Capitol Building’s Statuary Hall, and his associate Sant Marianne Cope.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial;">In ancient Israel, however, what was called leprosy was sometimes not Damien’s fatal disease but a relatively superficial skin condition, which was actually curable. Thus, the Jewish law made provision for examination by a priest and an offering on the occasion of someone’s being healed. Until one had been properly examined and certified as healed, however, a “leper” remained ritually impure.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial;">In such a world, where it was believed that only God could heal leprosy and where sickness was seen as a serious threat, the leper was shunned. Cut off from ordinary life and regular relationships with others, the leper’s lot must have been a miserable one indeed. Then suddenly, into this sad world of sickness and exclusion, appeared Jesus.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">Apparently, the news about Jesus and his healing powers had made the rounds and reached even the marginalized leper. So, suddenly we see a leper actually approaching Jesus directly, doing precisely what the Law prohibited him from doing. <i>A leper came to Jesus and kneeling down begged him and said, “If you wish, you can make me clean.” </i><span style="font-size: x-small;">[<o:p></o:p></span></span><span style="text-align: left;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Mark 1:40-45]</span></span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial;"><i><br /></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial;">“<i><u>If</u> you wish</i>!” What exactly did that “if” mean? Did the leper doubt Jesus? And, if so, what exactly was he doubting about Jesus? Apparently, he didn’t doubt that Jesus had the power to heal him – actually quite amazing, given the general belief that only God could cure leprosy! If the leper had little or no doubt about Jesus’ power, Jesus’ ability, to heal him, however, he still seems evidently to have wondered whether Jesus would want to heal him, whether he cared enough to heal him. (Fear of germs, after all, is only one of many motives for erecting barriers between ourselves and others).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial;">Jesus understood and answered: <i>“I do will it. Be made clean.”</i> But, before he said that, Jesus did something even more meaningful to the leper, something so radical it in fact violated the Law and implicated Jesus in the leper’s ritually impure status. <i>Moved with pity, </i>Jesus <i>stretched out his hand, and touched him.</i><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial;"><i><br /></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial;">In his desperation, the leper had boldly broken the Law and approached Jesus directly. Jesus reciprocated with a dramatic, unexpected <u>touch</u>, that spoke more than all the words in the world. With that one touch, Jesus joined the leper in his impurity and uncleanness, dramatically ending his segregation from society. With that one powerful touch, Jesus summarized his entire mission to become one with us, and so to end our segregation from God and enable us to join together with one another in the fuller, more abundant kind of life that God wants us to live.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial;">The same Jesus, who <i>stretched out his hand, and touched</i> the leper, continues his healing touch here and now in the life of his body, the Church. That healing is every bit as necessary now as it was then – not just because sickness and suffering still abound in our world, but because doubt also persists. How many of us at times really wonder whether anyone cares? How many of us at times doubt deep down whether even God cares? It is the mission and challenge of the Church – the mission and challenge therefore of each and every one of us – to express visibly, to embody physically, and so to become God’s healing presence and saving power present in our world, to continue Christ’s caring for us, by caring as he does.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial;">As the Law required, Jesus sent the leper <i>to the priest</i> to verify his healing, and to make the ritual offering in thanksgiving that the Law prescribed. Presumably, the leper went and did what was required for him to re-enter society, but the leper’s principal offering in thanksgiving was to<i> spread the report abroad </i>and<i> publicize the whole matter.</i><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial;"><i><br /></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial;">Whatever difficulties and doubts we may harbor, our healing will not be complete until we let Christ’s healing touch transform us, in and through our life and worship together as his Church, into agents of Christ’s caring touch to and for all the world.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial;"><i>Homily for the 6th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cathedral of Saint Andrew </i>(photo above),<i> Grand Rapids, MI, February 10-11, 2024.</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><br /></p>City Fatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17769559147659492086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538477881080991285.post-51618595735434353122024-02-09T15:29:00.000-05:002024-02-09T15:29:53.255-05:00He Grasped Her Hand and Helped Her<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN0uCRf3vFQOPjOzokoDE6hlRXPGj5plmDcWK50uT_thiIyVxoOownW9qb2eoIYb8V-t5i26P8w6zNTIdwqU9J2p_8SkJHX5pIO_hgP_Cv8fMirZzjqOUa-dUmwDTvK7H-A3t4BfY-Zmg8_xE-yA7YvJiVqx2SmfH47kXMhLkKk3A9r-dhY3sgP0llDSIS/s1221/Altar.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1221" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN0uCRf3vFQOPjOzokoDE6hlRXPGj5plmDcWK50uT_thiIyVxoOownW9qb2eoIYb8V-t5i26P8w6zNTIdwqU9J2p_8SkJHX5pIO_hgP_Cv8fMirZzjqOUa-dUmwDTvK7H-A3t4BfY-Zmg8_xE-yA7YvJiVqx2SmfH47kXMhLkKk3A9r-dhY3sgP0llDSIS/s320/Altar.jpg" width="210" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">Sickness is certainly one of the universal human experiences. Some of us may be lucky to be generally healthier than others; but few of us get to escape any sickness at all. And some of us, especially as we get older, may get much more seriously sick, perhaps even chronically ill. And, after the traumatic experience of the covid pandemic, we all worry about some new disease, some new epidemic unexpectedly upsetting business as usual. As Job reminds us, when we are sick, we experience how powerless we really are, how limited our control; and, like Job, we may feel discouraged and angry, and ask</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif"> </span><i>Is not life on earth a drudgery? </i><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;">[Job 7:1-4, 6-7].</span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Judging from today’s Gospel <span style="font-size: x-small;">[Mark 1:29-39]</span>, Jesus spent a lot of his time curing the sick, liberating people from the various physical and spiritual disabilities that has hitherto overpowered them. That seems to be how his reputation spread. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">So, when he entered Simon and Andrew’s house and heard that <i>Simon’s mother-in-law lay sick with a fever</i>, Jesus took charge of the situation, <i>grasped her by the hand and helped her up – </i>a scene so encouraging that it might have lifted even Job out of his depression! In doing this, by healing the sick, Jesus was revealing his Father to us – exemplifying God’s care for us. The Gospel says he <i>grasped her by the hand</i>. Touching is one of those things people tend to be especially squeamish about with the sick. It has been sugg</span><span style="font-family: arial;">ested, for example,</span><span style="font-family: arial;"> that one reason people on </span><i style="font-family: arial;">Downton </i><i style="font-family: arial;">Abbey</i><span style="font-family: arial;"> shook hands so infrequently was that people were worried about catching things! Fair enough, in a world without antibiotics! All of us here have lived through and remember the covid pandemic of 2020, especially those early weeks when we were washing our hands all the time and keeping our distance from one another. Some of these emergency measures made sense, some didn’t. I was a pastor in Knoxville, TN, at the time, and I remember leaving the mail out in the sun on the porch for several hours for the sunlight to kill the virus, at a time when even touching the mail was thought by some to be dangerous.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">But Jesus often touched the people he healed. With that one simple gesture, he joined himself with the sick and suffering who were stuck at the margins of normal social activity. In so doing, he summarized the story of his life, his mission to become one with us and so to empower us to get up and live that fuller life God really wants us to live.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Good news travels fast. Soon, <i>the whole town was gathered at the door</i>. And so it has been ever since as the Church continues Christ’s life and mission in our world – caring for the sick and accompanying them with the Church’s prayer. The same God who cares enough to touch us, by becoming one of us in his Son, continues to bring us together in the same struggle against suffering. Even apart from global pandemics, sickness separates people, straining, limiting, even destroying normal social activities and relationships. In Jesus’ presence, however, the healthy were drawn to the sick and became part of the healing process. The first thing the disciples did was to tell Jesus about Simon’s mother-in-law. Later on, when other sick people were brought to Jesus, they didn’t come alone. <i>The whole town</i> brought them.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Something similar still happens at the pilgrimage site of Lourdes. More maybe than any other single site, Lourdes is known as one of those special places to which pilgrims come from all over the world to seek physical and spiritual healing. It is especially inspiring to witness the compassionate and loving way in which the sick are welcomed and enabled to participate in all the various activities there.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">Like Lourdes, but more accessible than a pilgrimage, the Anointing of the Sick is another expression of Christ’s healing presence and saving power continuing in our world – calling us too to care as he does. For centuries, one of prayers of that sacramental ritual has taken inspiration from the story of Peter’s mother-in-law to pray that the sick who have been anointed may return to their regular work, restored by the gift of God’s mercy. Isn’t that how all of us - healthy or sick - experience God’s mercy every day in our here-and-now ordinary lives?</span><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><i><br /></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><i>Homily for the 5th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, February 4, 2024.</i></span></p>City Fatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17769559147659492086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538477881080991285.post-22618453277970109922024-02-03T07:27:00.001-05:002024-02-03T07:27:54.390-05:00Of Taylor and Travis<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVfxlZ2KYiO6xdX8WzbR-tWH1ZSjVnNFQ1hrY8_5Wflmul1n4IYgt1iacOkgPUtCNQTZMZ9JCz-o-sHBKyizuhUJj97QjE0Zaie0AM_NdcqdwG2ag9czFsz4Q6O3Qu3E0a_5QZN3uCzO2brDymp_StQnG1M6YIhLiBlpR7YLEBR-hmOQmbqtWKea2dkUBO/s1050/Taylor-kisses-Travis-tout-102323-0e27bc3023174a9dba604e6d7dc9a4de.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="700" data-original-width="1050" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVfxlZ2KYiO6xdX8WzbR-tWH1ZSjVnNFQ1hrY8_5Wflmul1n4IYgt1iacOkgPUtCNQTZMZ9JCz-o-sHBKyizuhUJj97QjE0Zaie0AM_NdcqdwG2ag9czFsz4Q6O3Qu3E0a_5QZN3uCzO2brDymp_StQnG1M6YIhLiBlpR7YLEBR-hmOQmbqtWKea2dkUBO/s320/Taylor-kisses-Travis-tout-102323-0e27bc3023174a9dba604e6d7dc9a4de.webp" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 16px; orphans: 2; outline: currentcolor; widows: 2;">I read recently that, according to at least one poll</span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 16px; orphans: 2; outline: currentcolor; widows: 2;">, 18% of voters would be more likely to vote for whichever candidate Taylor Swift endorsed. That alone, I suppose, might make Taylor - and her romantic relationship with Kansas City Chiefs' Tight End Travis Kelce - a matter of major importance, a phenomenon of significance for everyone to engage with.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial; font-size: 16px; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">Of course, in a normal country, with normal politics, that might mean that both parties might try to compete for her endorsement and (more importantly) for the votes of those who love her. Instead, however, on the Republican side we have been witnessing a weird psycho-political meltdown of apocalyptic proportions. Only a party like the contemporary Republican Party - i.e., a party that has ceased to be a</span><i style="font-family: arial; font-size: 16px; orphans: 2; outline: currentcolor; widows: 2;"><span class="ydpf30c60b2yiv7344164966ydp37efd234Apple-converted-space" style="outline: currentcolor;"> </span>bona fide</i><span class="ydpf30c60b2yiv7344164966ydp37efd234Apple-converted-space" style="font-family: arial; font-size: 16px; orphans: 2; outline: currentcolor; widows: 2;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial; font-size: 16px; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">political party and become a quasi-religious personality cult - could conceivably see any advantage at all in going to war against both the world's most popular woman and the NFL.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial; font-size: 16px; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">Everyone recognizes football's quasi-religious (i.e., idolatrous) hold on American culture, and it is hard even to imagine anyone attempting any potentially successful political strategy involving denigrating a football star and his girlfriend! As many others have already pointed out in the recent barrage of coverage and commentary, Taylor and Travis are acting out one of the most ancient archetypes of heteronormativity, which we all grew up with in their fairytale forms, and it only serves to highlight the bizarre weirdness of contemporary Republicans that they feel so deeply threatened by this happy expression of normalcy.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;">Ours is a society which, by a monumentally consequential historical accident, deprived itself of real royalty and has ever since sought for substitutes in celebrity royalty of various sorts. What else are Taylor and Travis but the latest ersatz Princess and Prince for our royalty-starved civic culture?</span></p><div dir="ltr" style="outline: currentcolor;"><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; outline: currentcolor; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;"><div style="outline: currentcolor; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; outline: currentcolor;">The right's moral panic is presumably exacerbated by the fact that Travis has previously endorsed a life-saving vaccine and that Taylor in 2020 endorsed Joe Biden. Both of which, of course, only further highlight the couple's normalcy. In a normal country, with normal politics, why wouldn't an athlete endorse something intended to keep people healthy? Why wouldn't the world's most prominent woman be expected to be more likely to support someone who is running against a candidate whom a jury recently found liable for defaming a woman whom an earlier jury had found liable for sexually assaulting?</span></div><div style="outline: currentcolor; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; outline: currentcolor;"><br clear="none" style="outline: currentcolor;" /></span></div><div data-setdir="false" dir="ltr" style="outline: currentcolor; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; outline: currentcolor;">Taylor's and Travis' normalcy just highlights how pathologically abnormal our politics have become - and thus the world we live and work within.</span></div></div></div><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><span style="background-color: white; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2;"><i>Photo: Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, Chariah Gordon/Instagram</i></span></span></p><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />City Fatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17769559147659492086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538477881080991285.post-20835512270299459582024-02-02T14:33:00.000-05:002024-02-02T14:33:06.756-05:00Isaac Hecker and Political Polarization<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHhO3sQunRk0dFKCzDf2KBj_D8JwbwrROmXd_brODI2Hi7u_Wbhz0knf_wDqaRpzlk0M21ziIJFUA1ZsuGzl-uqe-vCKsbBecaOeCUA5XFghQCePJYEJDqxQe_rCN1e0_C9TWFnd565kPXiMyZC89W-783i2ZIeEakDnYp9ShJjnf8DbskEINx6LkenO-x/s871/Breakfast.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="388" data-original-width="871" height="143" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHhO3sQunRk0dFKCzDf2KBj_D8JwbwrROmXd_brODI2Hi7u_Wbhz0knf_wDqaRpzlk0M21ziIJFUA1ZsuGzl-uqe-vCKsbBecaOeCUA5XFghQCePJYEJDqxQe_rCN1e0_C9TWFnd565kPXiMyZC89W-783i2ZIeEakDnYp9ShJjnf8DbskEINx6LkenO-x/s320/Breakfast.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>The following is an edited version of a talk given at Saint Paul the Apostle Parish, New York, January 27, 2024.</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Isaac Hecker lived from 1819 to 1888. His life spanned the Second Great Awakening, the rise (and fall) of Jacksonian democracy, the U.S. Civil War, and the Gilded Age. A saint, Thomas Merton wrote, “is a sign of God for his own generation and for all generations to come.” Hecker, of course, is not yet a saint, although hopefully he will be someday. That said, as a man of his time, his story invites us to start with ourselves in our time here and now.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">One of the preoccupations that surfaced at the Paulist pre-assembly meetings in 2022 was the destructive divisiveness and political polarization that characterize both contemporary American society and the Church, and which man are experiencing even in their parishes. Many have compared this situation to the pre-Civil War period in American history. It was, of course, precisely in that period of division and polarization when Hecker himself proposed to Blessed Pope Pius IX that Catholicism might “act like oil on troubled waters” and so “sustain our institutions and enable our young country to realize its great destiny.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Such polarization is of particular importance for the Church, both because the Church is tasked with the ministry of reconciliation<span style="font-size: x-small;"> [2 Corinthians 5:18-19]</span> but also because the Church herself is also currently characterized by deep divisions that reflect and in some ways may mimic the political polarization that so preoccupies political analysis today. (The increasing politicization of religious identity is itself a significant issue, which deserves additional separate treatment another time.)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">On the one hand, as Georgetown political scientist Thomas Zimmer has remarked, "the least controversial thing you can do in American politics is to decry polarization."<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">On the other hand, </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">everywhere we look, Americans appear more divided than at any time in our recent history. Certainly, our two political parties have moved apart, which is to say that the once central middle ground previously occupied by moderate Republicans and moderate-to-conservative Democrats has largely disappeared. This has happened steadily over the last 50 years, thanks to a multitude of political factors, which students of the subject have easily identified. If I may regress for a few minutes to my previous vocation as a political scientist, these include the declining power of party leaders and the increased role of party primaries in choosing candidates, the role of money in campaigns, the changed incentives for elected politicians in a media-centered celebrity culture, the increasing number of "safe districts" in which there is no incentive to appeal to and persuade voters beyond one's own party, and the increasing nationalization of American politics, due to the loss of local newspapers and other factors which once made local politics different from national politics. This last factor may deserve more attention than it has generally received, because, for many people on a practical level, local involvements with neighbors and the wider community, including people with different political sensibilities, may be their one opportunity for constructive engagements which counteract the overwhelmingly national pattern of polarization. (And, if that sounds like the description of what was once a traditional Catholic parish in the U.S., that’s no accident.)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">It is likewise problematic that we have increasingly re-sorted themselves socially, politically, geographically, and even in our parishes. In the post-war world in which I grew up, American pluralistic politics used to be characterized by what were commonly called "cross-cutting cleavages." That described a situation in which different groups and interests overlapped, in which voters allied with one another along different lines on different issues depending on their different interests, in which all the aspects of one's life did not all align together. One can trace some appreciation of this back to James Madison's <i>Federalist 10</i>, and it was the staple of mid-20th-century pluralist political thought. In contrast, "reinforcing cleavages" occur when the groups and issues which one identifies with all fall on the same side of the political spectrum. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">The problem is not that there are disagreements among different groups with different interests, which is inevitable; but that the differences are increasingly reinforcing, rather than cross-cutting. All of which at best tests, at worst corrodes our capacity to advance the country's interests and the common good.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">That said, </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">that post-1945 world so many of us so fondly remember, </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">what the French fondly remember as </span><span style="background: white; color: #4d5156; font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">“Les Trentes Glorieuses,” </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">was not the historical norm, which actually may have been more like Hecker’s America and, in that sense, more like ours.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">How did Hecker respond to polarization in his time?<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">At his very first audience with Blessed Pope Pius IX, on December 22, 1857, in response to the Pope’s concern about factional strife 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.” <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">For Hecker, the Roman Catholic Church, the Body of Christ which continues the mission of Christ’s Incarnation in the world, was 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.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">At the heart of what he said and wrote, was this basic appreciation of what he had experienced in the Catholic Church, the Body of Christ which continues Christ’s life and work in the world - and the individual and social effects which flow from openness to that divine activity. As he wrote in his final book, <i>The Church and the Age</i>, published the year before he died, “The church must justly be said to be the expansion prolongation, and perpetration of the Incarnation” . </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Hecker’s charism is a continuing invitation to read and reread our time and place through the unique experience of the Church’s life and then to share that experience with the world in our particular time and place. So, while many of Hecker’s 19<span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span>-century hopes and aspirations have been contradicted by historical developments, we may still rightly seek inspiration in Hecker’s vision of social reconciliation through religious evangelization. In our own time of religious and political division, we may do well to look at our church life more intensely through this particular lens.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Hecker proposed a religious renewal of American society rooted in authentic personal spiritual renewal. He aspired to what he called, in a letter to Orestes Brownson, “a higher tone of catholic life in our country.” The Catholic faith, he continued, “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.” <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Hecker hoped his Paulist Fathers’ community could be an effective vehicle for getting us all from here to there. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">The abiding question remains how, formed by Hecker’s charism, we can freshly read our time and place to implement Hecker’s proposed renewal as part of the present-day mission of a seriously stressed and divided Church, in a society in which so much of what Hecker admired about the US now no longer exists.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">How had Hecker found the Church, and what had he found in her?<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Hecker’s proposed solution to the problem of polarization was the Roman Catholic Church, which he himself had discovered as the solution to his own spiritual search. That search had started at an early age. This is reflected in the image at the base of Fr. Hecker’s sarcophagus in St. Paul the Apostle Church, which shows Isaac as a sick child, in danger of death from smallpox, reassuring his mother: “No, mother, I shall not die now; God has work for me to do in the world, and I shall live to do it.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><sup><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><o:p> </o:p></span></sup></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">So Hecker soon started asking some big-picture questions about life: “Often in my boyhood, when lying at night on the shavings before the oven in the bake house, I would start up, roused in spite of myself, by some great thought … What does God desire from me? What shall I attain unto Him? What is it He has sent me into the world to do? These were the ceaseless questions of my heart, that rested, meanwhile, in an unshaken confidence that time would bring the answer.<sup><span style="font-size: small;">”</span><o:p></o:p></sup></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">In American religious history, this was the era of religious revival known as the <i>Second Great Awakening</i>, which was even more socially and politically conscious than the earlier, colonial-era First Great Awakening. So much of the distinctive character American culture and its mingling of religion and politics stem from this period, which was when the U.S. became what Chesterton would famously call: “a nation with the soul of a church.” <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">By his own account, Hecker spend several years examining the principal Protestant sects, sampling as many as possible of the leading contemporary religious ideas, none of which, however, proved satisfactory to him. Confident that “it is not reasonable to suppose that [God] would implant in the soul such an ardent thirst for truth and not reveal it,” he eventually continued his search for the truth in the Catholic Church, “the place,” as he put it, “where it is supposed among Protestants the least to exist.” But then: “The Catholic Church burst upon my vision as the object to which all my efforts had been unintentionally directed. It was not a change, but a sudden realization of all that had hitherto obscurely captivated my mind, and secretly attracted my heart.<sup>”</sup><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">In thus describing his spiritual quest and its seemingly surprising outcome, Hecker wanted to emphasize what would become his lifelong conviction that Catholicism was consistent with and indeed the true fulfillment of the aspirations of human nature – a 19<span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span> century American version of the famous theme of St. Augustine’s <i>Confessions</i>: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you<i>.</i>” <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Hecker’s sarcophagus portrays him searching for God at Brook Farm – a transcendentalist, utopian community, founded in Massachusetts by George Ripley in 1841. New England Transcendentalism had its roots in the Unitarian rejection of classical Calvinist doctrine and orthodox Christianity in general – what Hecker himself later characterized as “a gradual loosening of the Christian principles in men’s minds and a falling away into general skepticism.” <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Such was the circle that the 20-something Hecker associated with in 1843 – first at Brook Farm and then at Bronson Alcott’s short-lived, somewhat more ascetic Fruitlands community. A smart, if formally relatively uneducated, working-class young man, Hecker was excited to enter this elite community and its intellectual life. This transcendentalist environment proved quite conducive to Hecker’s intense preoccupation with exploring his inner life, and his companions nicknamed him “Ernest the Seeker,” the name of a character in a contemporary short story by William Henry Channing. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Whereas the Puritan preacher Cotton Mother had once said, “I like to sweeten my mouth with a piece of Calvin before I go to sleep,” Hecker thoroughly absorbed the Transcendentalists’ critique of mainline New England Protestantism, recalling “Against Calvinism we had a particular grudge.” To the end of his life, he would oppose “the Calvinist image of human nature as totally corrupt.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Apart from that, however, even while appreciating the friendships there and benefiting from an environment that encouraged him to value and explore his inner life, Hecker maintained a certain intellectual independence from the beliefs of the Transcendentalists, thus enabling his exploration of his soul to lead to conclusions quite different from what the Transcendentalists believed. In his <i>Diary</i>, he described a transcendentalist (e.g. Emerson) as one who “prefers talking about love to possessing it, as he. Prefers Socrates to Jesus. Nature is his church and he is his own god”<span style="font-size: x-small;"> [June 13, 1844].</span><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Instead, he found himself more and more drawn to institutional Christianity. His early identification of Divine Providence with the divine indwelling made theological sense of the continuity between nature and grace, which he felt from his own experience, thus easing his way into the Church and laying the groundwork for his mature thought about the relationship between Church and society and the evangelization of the latter by the former. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">He studied the <i>Catechism</i> of the Council of Trent and was especially impressed by Article IX on the doctrine of the communion of saints. Writing in the Paulist magazine, <i>The Catholic World</i>, one year before his death, Hecker recalled: “When, in 1843, I first read in the catechism of the Council of Trent the doctrine of the communion of saints, it went right home. It alone was to me a heavier weight on the Catholic side of the scales than the best historical argument which could be presented. … The body made alive by such truths ought to be of divine life and its origin traceable to a divine establishment: it ought to be the true church.<sup>”</sup> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">In our contemporary idiom, Hecker had been “spiritual but not religious” for the first 25 years of his life. The story of his spiritual search eloquently exemplifies the appeal of such searching and may speak to the spiritual longings of some in our own society today. What was significant about Hecker’s “spiritual but not religious” period, however, was that he did not remain that way. For Hecker, seeking was never an end in itself. The point of seeking was finding. Once the object was found, the search ended. Having found fulfillment in the Catholic Church, he never desired to look farther. Rather, he desired to devote his life to helping others – especially other seekers, such as he himself had been – to find the truth in the Catholic Church. His missionary activity reflected his deep devotion and fidelity to the Church. Above all, he prized the unity and universality of the Church, which had attracted him to it in the first place. Reflecting upon his experience many years later, Hecker wrote that 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.” For us today, living in an era when people find it increasingly hard to make substantial commitments, those are words well worth meditating upon.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">So how did Hecker’s Roman Catholicism redefine for him the America of his time?<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Like the most famous foreign observer and analyst of Jacksonian American society and institutions, the French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), Hecker appreciated 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 individuals in a new kind of society. 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 described American democracy’s utterly unexpected compatibility with Catholicism. He recognized “that the Catholic religion has erroneously been looked upon as the natural enemy of democracy,” but he argued that “the Catholics of the United States are at the same time the most faithful believers and the most zealous citizens” – a view Hecker himself would soon share. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">In 19<span style="font-size: x-small;">th-</span>century Europe, the Catholic Church was struggling to survive as an institution against an increasingly individualistic and irreligious liberal political order that sought to constrain it. In reaction, the 19<span style="font-size: x-small;">th-</span>century Church sought to counteract the growing social fragmentation and to reconnect increasingly isolated individuals into a community by preserving, repairing, or restoring religious bonds. One approach was to assert the Church’s claims to authority as vigorously as possible and to insist upon the Church’s political privileges and institutional rights in relation to the state and upon the traditional constitutional arrangements (for example, the union of throne and altar) that appeared most compatible with the Church’s social and political position, if only because of the security this seemingly offered in the face of frightening and unpredictable change. (A contemporary version of that is “Integralism,” which is enjoying a certain renaissance among some conservative Catholic intellectuals, but which has never had any serious prospect of succeeding in an American context, something Hecker certainly understood.) <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Hecker’s religious alternative to that primarily political approach envisaged a social solution in which individuals, converted to Catholicism as the answer to their deepest human aspirations would be empowered, by combining true religion and democratic political institutions, to develop society along Catholic lines. His was a thoroughly religious form of discourse, uniquely capable of addressing social and political concerns.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Whereas for Hecker’s famous contemporary Karl Marx (1818-1883), religion meant alienation and its survival in society showed the inadequacy of its purely political separation from the state, for Hecker Roman Catholicism was the fulfillment of the most authentic aspirations of human nature; and its power to transform society through the conversion of citizens more than compensated for the Church’s loss of political power thanks to its separation from the State.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">In one of his last <i>Catholic World</i> articles, published in the year he died, Hecker, quoting an anonymous acquaintance, said “he didn’t care for union of church and state if he could have union of church and people.” Such comments convey how he continued to conceptualize religion’s role in the transformation of society, and how he confidently expected this to accomplish more effectively what others hoped for from politics.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Hecker never wavered in his conviction that what he had found in Catholicism – and what he had been able to find only in Catholicism – could and would be America’s answer as well. He was confident that neither Calvinism nor Unitarianism or Transcendentalism would ultimately have much appeal to Americans. For Hecker, who, he hoped, would better appreciate how Catholicism simultaneously accepted the necessity of revelation and grace while still recognizing the permanence and value of nature and reason. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Having himself experienced the divided and fragmented character of modern society, Hecker had found an alternative in the mission of the Church, as the organic temporal expression of Christ’s life, to continue Christ’s work by pouring oil on the troubled waters of the world. There was nothing new about this. Christ’s life and work are realized in the Church through the mission of the Holy Spirit who dwells by grace in each of us. According to Hecker, to discern the Church’s action clearly, “and to cooperate with it effectually, is the highest employment of our faculties, and at the same time the primary source of the greatest good to society” (<i>The Church and the Age</i>). <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">On this basis, Hecker’s approach sought to root the renewal of American society in a Catholic religious renewal inseparable from the spiritual renewal of his fellow citizens made possible by grace.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Hecker’s important insight was that, since all creation is always ultimately ordered to grace, even certain new situations and social arrangements, which are perceived as obstacles, (like American democracy and separation of church and state) may actually be new opportunities for individual and social transformation through the Church’s ongoing realization of Christ’s incarnation. Applying this to today, we might well also ask: What other apparent novelties which might be perceived as obstacles might really be opportunities?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Hecker was well aware that his spiritual insights into American democracy’s compatibility with Catholicism and what Catholicism had to offer to America hardly corresponded to conventional wisdom – on either side of the Atlantic. He never wavered, however, in his conviction that what he had been able to find only in Catholicism could and would be America’s answer as well. He combined Catholic universalism and a distinctly American self-understanding of the relationship between religion and society in a providential perspective, which could work politically within the framework bequeathed by classical liberalism’s separation of society and state. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">If Hecker’s solution as Religion, how Americans had previously experienced Religion represented the Problem.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Hecker’s practical judgments about the optimal relationship between Church and State reflected his assessment of the relationship between religion and society. His American alternative was not a political solution to the problems posed by liberalism, but a social solution to the underlying religious problem that he believed afflicted America. This was specifically two aspects he found fundamental in Protestantism – the Calvinist belief in, human depravity, which he believed made people unfit for self-government, and the Protestant principle of individual interpretation, which he believed ill-fitted people for community. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">So, in 1861, at the start of the Civil War, Hecker wrote in a letter: “Our present crisis is not an unmitigated evil, if it leads us to see the necessity of a greater dependence on God for our well-being as a nation … Who can tell, God in his inscrutable providence may in our present trials and sacrifices be preparing our people to see the necessity to acknowledge the truth of his holy Catholic religion.” <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Always inclined to see Divine Providence at work, Hecker interpreted the fragmentation of the country religiously rather than politically, an opportunity to highlight what Catholicism had to offer. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Hecker’s curious conviction concerning the compatibility of Catholicism and American institutions, surprising as it seemed to so many at the time, was paralleled by what must have seemed even more surprising, his even more curious conviction concerning the incompatibility of Protestantism and American institutions, a continuous theme in his writings for the rest of his life.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Hecker continued the Transcendentalist critique of Calvinism, understood as a doctrine of “total depravity” - the cornerstone of his novel apologetic approach, which highlighted Catholicism’s compatibility with human nature – in contrast to Protestantism as he understood it. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Already in <i>Aspirations of Nature</i>, he had warned: “If our nature be wholly bad, desires nothing, and can do nothing, but sin, of course, we cannot be expected to desire the truth, to love the good, to crave religion, to reverence God, or to wish for any virtue or goodness whatever.” <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Americans, Hecker believed, realized that the philosophy of democratic self-government could not be reconciled to doctrinal Calvinism. And this was actually happening, but it did not in fact necessarily lead Americans to Catholicism. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Of course, Hecker’s whole understanding of Protestantism was deeply colored by his encounter with the anti-Calvinist Transcendentalists at Brook Farm. And, though he gained many positive things from this experience, he tended to see Protestantism too much from this particular perspective. From that angle he concluded that Protestantism was disappearing – to be replaced by Unitarianism or Catholicism as the only alternative options - a view he never quite overcame.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">In this too, however, Hecker was very typically American.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Much as the traditional U.S. founding narratives typically privilege the influence of New England over the Spanish settlements and even over the other English colonies with different variants of Protestantism, Hecker’s narrative of American religion regularly privileged New England Protestantism and its historical variants over other American religious experiences. He seemed to ignore the strong roots of Protestantism in other parts of America, which his travels should have shown him. In particular, Hecker’s narrow picture of American Protestantism dramatically failed to appreciate Protestantism’s capacity to revitalize itself precisely at its own evangelical roots. Indeed, already in his somewhat critical 1857 review of <i>Aspirations of Nature</i>, Orestes Brownson had highlighted how Evangelical Protestantism was by then the more dominant American religious tradition, one reason why Brownson became increasingly less confident in the conversion of America.<sup> </sup> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">In our day, of course, mainline Protestantism may appear in fact to be fulfilling Hecker’s expectation that it would die out, but Evangelical Protestantism has not only grown and thrived – at least until very recently. Meanwhile, it has somewhat successfully assumed for itself the identification with America’s destiny that the Mainline had inherited from old New England Puritanism and which Hecker had thought would pass to Catholicism. On the other hand, the more recent but increasing phenomenon of the thorough politicization of the religious identification with America’s destiny suggests a movement in the direction opposite to Hecker’s expectation – not religion replacing politics, but politics replacing religion.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">In our own time of cultural, moral, social, and political polarization in both our society and our Church, the inevitable temptation is to imagine alternative futures for either or both – as if such alternatives were easily in our power. However, Hecker’s “approach remained rooted in religious conversion, our own and that of our fellow-citizens. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">That said, neither can we escape the bigger picture. Much of what Hecker admired about America, including its egalitarianism and sociability, no longer characterizes the contemporary post-industrial, corporate, centralized state. Likewise, American Catholicism - the religious remedy he posited for the social fragmentation which the United States still experiences - has changed as well. While conversions continued both during and after Hecker’s lifetime, they have never been in the numbers necessary to make the kind of impact on society Hecker had hoped for. What did make an actual impact, then and now, has been immigration, which has historically uniquely positioned the American Catholic Church to play a prominent part in the desperately required mission of cultural, ethnic, and racial reconciliation in this country. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">It can be argued, meanwhile, that Hecker may really have been too optimistic about America and so did not appreciate how much, for example, the anti-democratic features of the U.S. Constitution really do reflect the Protestant Founders’ very negative view of human nature and human possibilities. The things that Hecker liked about America and the things that he disliked may have been more intrinsically connected than he was inclined to credit.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">On the other hand, as the Claretian Fr. Martin Kirk has suggested, if the U.S. Catholic church had been more open to Hecker’s impulse “to enter more fully into American culture, the position of the Church to bear prophetic witness within the culture might have been more feasible and more effective” </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">[Kirk, 1988, pp. 382-383].</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Some things to think about! <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Always bearing in mind, however, that our question cannot be <i>What would Hecker do if faced with the problems we have today</i>? Our question must rather be <i>What should someone inspired by Hecker’s life and ideas do, faced with the problems we have today? </i><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p>City Fatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17769559147659492086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538477881080991285.post-38944539526674383412024-02-02T06:41:00.008-05:002024-02-02T08:53:48.176-05:00Candlemas Day<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLbvzkr3AsuAqAbn46Bcr0W-9kbXcmmlg33MF4yI-IClHlitl0gZvC9TVJFkNx9TeOIw8nm1F8jkjWuXYn8L2tY3ybuQzsNqCvikOK3ln81mDkXy9qHzTGKHjQkYYAhPosr0eNkIAAkvOqr3EzVavXc0c01NVCKbgOfKmIrzB7WaIJ4roEBxHBFIgsrv-7/s224/Candle.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="224" data-original-width="224" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLbvzkr3AsuAqAbn46Bcr0W-9kbXcmmlg33MF4yI-IClHlitl0gZvC9TVJFkNx9TeOIw8nm1F8jkjWuXYn8L2tY3ybuQzsNqCvikOK3ln81mDkXy9qHzTGKHjQkYYAhPosr0eNkIAAkvOqr3EzVavXc0c01NVCKbgOfKmIrzB7WaIJ4roEBxHBFIgsrv-7/s1600/Candle.jpeg" width="224" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">The familiar carol concludes on the 12th day, but today is actually the 40th - and final - day of Christmas. In Catholic countries, it is a common custom for the nativity scene to remain on display in churches until today. (So, 12 years ago, while I was studying at "Saints' School" in Rome, I had almost a full month between my early-January arrival and Candlemas in which to visit the various </span><i style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">presepe</i><span face="Arial, sans-serif"> </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif">on display in Rome’s many churches.)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">Today is officially <i>the Presentation of the Lord, </i>although for several centuries it was also called <i>the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary.</i> According to the Gospel </span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt;">[Luke 2:22-40]</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif">, Mary and Joseph took Jesus to Jerusalem <i>according to the law of Moses</i> to observe two important religious obligations. The first was the ordinary obligation in that society to be purified after childbirth, reflecting ancient beliefs about the sacredness of blood and the requirement of ritual purification after any direct contact with blood. The second concerned the special status and religious responsibilities of a first-born son (because of God’s having spared Israel’s first-born at the time of the Exodus from Egypt). <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">But, whatever the official title, the common popular title for today’s celebration has long been <i>Candlemas Day, </i>because of the Blessing of Candles and the Procession - originally in Rome an early morning, pre-dawn procession, somewhat penitential in character – with which the more solemn celebration of today’s Mass begins. According to <i>The Golden Legend</i>: "On the calends of February the Romans honored Februa the mother of Mars the god of war, by lighting the city with candles and torches throughout the night of that day. ... Since it is hard to relinquish such customs and the Christians, converted from paganism, had difficulty giving them up, Pope Sergius transmuted them, decreeing that the faithful should honor the hold mother of the Lord on this day by lighting up the whole world with lamps and candles."<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">Although electric light is omnipresent, we still use candles. The fact that we no longer use them for ordinary light makes our use of them even more special. The <i>Candlemas</i> candles call attention to <u>l</u>ight – and to Jesus the One whom their light symbolizes. <i>Candlemas</i> comes at the mid-point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, the transition (according to one older way of reckoning the seasons) from winter to spring. Soon, day and night, light and dark will be equal. So, this last of the winter light festivals invites us to look ahead to what these winter light festivals are meant to symbolize.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">Meanwhile, at the same time as we recall with joy the Lord’s entry into his Temple: <i>and suddenly there will come to the temple the Lord whom you seek </i>(Malachi 3:1-4),<i> </i>we hear wise old Simeon’s words to Mary, the first reference to what lies ahead, the first reference to the cross. <i>Behold, this child is destined … to be a sign that will be contradicted – and you yourself a sword will pierce – so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.</i><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">So, even as we take one last look back at winter and Christmas, <i>Candlemas</i> looks ahead to spring and Lent, and reminds us that the point of Christmas is Easter. Meanwhile, Simeon and Anna’s encounter with the infant Jesus in the Jerusalem Temple points us toward our own encounter with the Risen Christ here and now.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">In the Gospel, Simeon prays, “Now, Master, you may let your servant go in peace.” In the Roman Rite, this canticle, known as the <i>Nunc Dimittis</i>, is an important part of daily Night Prayer (Compline). Concerning this, the great 20th-century liturgical scholar Pius Parsch wrote: “As we sing it we see Simeon holding the Child Jesus in his arms and then, with grateful heart, retiring from his earthly service to God. We too are in the Lord’s service. At the close of day we hold the Savior in our arms, mystically speaking; we hold Him in faith, in grace, in the sacraments, especially the Sacrament of the Altar. Fervently we thank God for His blessings; and we are prepared, if it be His will, to take our leave from the world.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: repeat white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><i>Homily for the Feast of the Presentation (Candlemas Day), Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, February 2, 2024.</i></span></p>City Fatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17769559147659492086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538477881080991285.post-89984159135829800952024-01-28T09:10:00.004-05:002024-01-28T16:57:33.593-05:00Counting to Easter<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOvrM7d3b0LwF9vJDbgOgAUJ9N2EIxkRto7wIiv99K9U9YRDwlxotRYOgqXPDbtnkcRIinm1DatTTysszOskr21K66D76Mt-WnnMQI6JfHaU7lc8JvDFRQTaqjg4DAAG60ygHr_2ZQslYFVw4VQP6kZKx0jHNL_tBIjVrbfJpDa8guyId3HvNRRbihyphenhyphenS4Q/s682/The%20Pancake%20Bakery.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="519" data-original-width="682" height="244" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOvrM7d3b0LwF9vJDbgOgAUJ9N2EIxkRto7wIiv99K9U9YRDwlxotRYOgqXPDbtnkcRIinm1DatTTysszOskr21K66D76Mt-WnnMQI6JfHaU7lc8JvDFRQTaqjg4DAAG60ygHr_2ZQslYFVw4VQP6kZKx0jHNL_tBIjVrbfJpDa8guyId3HvNRRbihyphenhyphenS4Q/s320/The%20Pancake%20Bakery.webp" width="320" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="-webkit-standard, serif"><br /></span><span face="Arial, sans-serif">With Christmas now well behind us, can Lent be far off? Thanks to the vagaries of the calendar, Lent and Easter will arrive relatively early this year (Ash Wednesday on February 14 and Easter on March 31 respectively). Early or late, however, they remain the centerpiece of the Church's yearly cycle, as the mysteries they celebrate stand at the center of the Christian life. In a sense, life is the very heart of Easter. As the great Pius Parsch <span style="font-size: x-small;">[</span></span><i style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The Church's Year of Grace</span></i><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;">, Volume 2] </span>put it, "Whereas at Christmas Christ manifested Himself primarily as light, He now [at Easter] manifests Himself in the Church and in the soul as life."</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">In the old calendar that the Church faithfully used for some 1500 years, today would have been <i>Septuagesima Sunday</i>, the first of three special Sundays - <i>Septuagesima</i>, <i>Sexagesima</i>, and <i>Quinquagesima</i> - that marked off these weeks as a distinctive pre-Lenten season. Those lovely Latin names meant the 70th, the 60th, and the 50th day before Easter. Some 1200+ years ago, Charlemagne (who died on this date in 814) is said to have asked why Sundays that were seven days apart were being numbered as if they were ten days apart. A very good question! But even he, King of the Franks and Western Roman Emperor that he was, couldn’t get an answer to this question! (Arithmetic aside, the supposedly 70-day <i>Septuagesima</i> season was traditionally seen as a symbolic season of exile - analogous to the biblical 70-year Babylonian Exile.)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"> </span><span face="-webkit-standard, serif"><br /></span><i><span face="Arial, sans-serif">Septuagesima</span></i><span face="Arial, sans-serif"> wasn't quite Lent, of course. Notably, the traditional Lenten prohibition against the solemnization of marriage did not yet apply until Ash Wednesday, which was why my parents were married 77 years ago on February 15, on what was then the Saturday before <i>Quinquagesima</i> Sunday - the last Saturday before Ash Wednesday.) And, of course, that season coincided with the festive, pre-Lenten Carnival, culminating on <i>Shrove Tuesday/Mardi Gras</i> - a season stereotypically associated with un-Lenten excess and pancakes. (Hence the photo above.)</span><span face="-webkit-standard, serif"><br /><br /></span><span face="Arial, sans-serif">The <i>Septuagesim</i>a season did, however, already share some of Lent’s liturgical features – in particular, purple vestments, no <i>Gloria</i>, and, most notably, no <i>Alleluia</i>. For centuries, the Saturday before <i>Septuagesima</i> was the day when <i>Alleluia</i> was said or sung for the last time at the end of Sunday's First Vespers, after which it was not heard again until the end of the Easter Vigil service on Holy Saturday morning. In the Middle Ages, the omission of the <i>Alleluia</i> was popularly ritualized by mock funeral rites in which the people, would "bury" the <i>Alleluia</i> (presumably to await its resurrection at Easter). At a time when people's ordinary lives still somewhat followed and reflected the rhythm of the liturgical seasons, these practices alerted people visually and otherwise that Lent was on its way. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">In the current calendar, however, Lent starts suddenly on Ash Wednesday, without any preparatory period. But then, of course, the contemporary Lent lacks the strict fasting that so strongly characterized the traditional Lent. So, perhaps not much preparation is needed now! <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="-webkit-standard, serif"><br /></span><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">In today’s still strangely unending liturgical warfare, there are fanatics who totally disparage the way the Church worshipped for over 1500 years, and others who seem convinced that the Church's worship reached a state of perfection with the 1568 Breviary and the 1570 Missal, to which any improvement is inconceivable and from which all alteration might as well be a sign of the apocalypse. Both positions are absurd, of course. The problem with trying to stake out a plausible position somewhere in between those extremes, however, is that it requires one to make intelligent judgments about which aspects of the post-Tridentine arrangement it may have been wise for the Church to alter and which it may have been less wise for her to change. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">Perhaps the best case to be made for eliminating pre-lent from the calendar was that Septuagesima suffered from an inherent in-betweenness - being a little like Lent but not quite Lent yet. Ambiguity is always a challenge, and the bureaucratic mentality that created the current calendar apparently had very little appreciation for ambiguity. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">On the other hand, the three now completely lost Sundays each had a magnificent Mass formulary dating back to Pope Saint Gregory the Great's time, and their Roman stational churches - St. Lawrence Outside the Walls, St. Paul's Outside the Walls, St. Peter's - attested to their importance, particularly in terms of the catechumenate. Perhaps, the desire to homogenize traditional liturgical variations that seems to have motivated so much of the reform may have been misplaced. Maybe more discernment might have separated valuable variations from merely antiquarian customs. Its arithmetic may have been off, but the <i>Septuagesima</i> season was liturgically rich, and those riches are now largely lost forever.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">Of course, the liturgy is not a museum-piece. More significant than the loss of a liturgical season is the fact that it hardly matters - that people's lives no longer reflect the rhythm of the liturgy. In an earlier age, all those visual and other variations in the liturgy aided the community in letting the liturgical seasons facilitate faith's connection with the rhythms of ordinary life. Today now that that connection has been almost completely severed, even if Septuagesima somehow were to be providentially restored, how much notice would it even get? The real challenge for today is to relearn how to make a connection between faith and ordinary life in our radically unprecedented circumstances.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial;">Image: </span><span style="background-color: white; orphans: 2; text-align: left; widows: 2;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Pieter Aertsen, “The Pancake Bakery”, 1560.</span></span></span></i></p>City Fatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17769559147659492086noreply@blogger.com0