May Day

The 4 seasonal turning point of Europe’s old pagan calendar have successfully survived the vicissitudes of centuries and have been seemingly preserved in various Christian and secular guises. So we have Lammas Day (“Loaf-Mass” Day) on August 1, Halloween and All Saints on October 31 and November 1, Candlemas Day and Groundhog Day on February 2, and finally May Day on May 1).

Thoroughly rooted in pre-Christian paganism, May Day seems have been the occasion least amenable to effective Christianization. The Puritans tried mightily to suppress it, of course. Under Puritan influence, the English Parliament outlawed maypoles in 1644. Then in the 19th century, by one of those accidents of historical coincidence, May Day acquired a whole new identity as various labor movements (and later by the communist party) adopted it as a day of socialist solidarity. In an attempt to counteract this celebration of socialism Pope Pius XII in 1955 proclaimed May 1 as the feast of St. Joseph the Worker, belatedly giving the old pagan – now secular and socialist – May Day a Christian character. With collapse of communism, the modern May Day of workers’ solidarity is undoubtedly much diminished. As for St. Joseph the Worker, even the liturgical calendar has downgraded the one-time 1st class feast to a merely optional memorial!

For me, May means summer is almost here. While I am certianly not insensitive to summer’s charms, I confess I have often welcomed summer’s arrival with only modest enthusiasm. Having come of age in a world with little or no air-conditioning, I have never really relished the summer heat. At some deeper emotional level, however, I think I have always associated summer with disruption. Perhaps because I was in school – either as a student or as a teacher – for most of the first half of my life (and always liked school much more than I ever disliked it), the end of the school year has always seemed somewhat sad to me. More than any other time of year, the months of May and June are the season of separation, par excellence. And for me that has always made them somewhat melancholy months.

So I also appreciate the irony that in the 20th century the word "Mayday" also became a recognized signal of distress!

The Immigration Issue (Again)

Not for the first time in recent American history, immigration is once again becoming a hot topic in American politics. It’s the issue that never seems to go away for very long – maybe because it touches so closely on who we are as a nation. (We are, after all, as has so often been said, “a nation of immigrants.”) On the other hand, it will be quite something if, on top of finally passing Health Care Reform and (hopefully) Financial Regulation Reform, Congress can seriously address yet another, important issue in this congressional session - in an election year, no less. (Are there any non-election years anymore?) One can always hope, however. Meanwhile, the failure to address the issue seriously at the federal level just seems to invite bad legislation at the state level, like the law just enacted in Arizona.

Immigration is an issue of special salience for the Church. For one thing, so many immigrants are members of the Church. Apart from that, they are often among the more vulnerable members of society and so are entitled to special moral concern on our part. Certainly, there are circumstances when public policy debates involve more than practical prudential judgments and concern matters of fundamental moral principle. Such circumstances arise when public policy either promotes what is always and everywhere intrinsically wrong (e.g., abortion) or attempts to prohibit what is morally obligatory. At the same time, the Gospel gives us no special skills when it comes to forming practical judgments about most public policy. It does not automatically tell us which particular policies will produce a more prosperous economy or a more stable and secure international balance of power. As citizens, we all have to make the best judgments we can using our human knowledge informed by our moral sense, always aware that morally sincere people can apply the same sets of principles and come to different conclusions concerning practical political, economic, and social issues.

As an individual citizen, of course, I must personally form my own (hopefully intelligently formed and morally rooted) opinions on public policy issues - immigration reform, among them. As a descendent of immigrants and an heir to their hopes and aspirations, my own personal political judgment is that not only has immigration historically been extremely beneficial for this country – in fact has made it the great nation and dynamic economy that it has been – but that immigration continues to be essential for our nation’s prosperity. I also believe, based both on historical and current experience, that - unlike some European countries, for example - the United States has been and continues to be exceptionally successful in assimilating immigrants. Being an American has always been more about a specifically civic identity than an ethnic one and is ultimately quite compatible with all sorts of ethnic and religious diversity.

The obligations of citizenship challenge us to form judgments about practical issues of public policy that take into account all relevant information and respect the legitimate contribution of those who come to different conclusions. The obligations of discipleship, however, challenge us to recognize that not all options are morally legitimate. Assisting people in need is morally obligatory and remains always an integral component of the mission of the Church.

Vocation Sunday

This Sunday is the 47th annual World Day of Prayer for Vocations. The designated theme for this year’s observance is Witness Awakens Vocations.

My picture of a chalice standing on the altar waiting to be picked up by someone is one way, I feel, of picturing the situation of the Church’s need for vocations today.

In his Message for the 47th Annual World Day of Prayer for Vocations, Pope Benedict XVI has written: “The fruitfulness of our efforts to promote vocations depends primarily on God’s free action, yet, as pastoral experience confirms, it is also helped by the quality and depth of the personal and communal witness of those who have already answered the Lord’s call to the ministerial priesthood and to the consecrated life, for their witness is then able to awaken in others a desire to respond generously to Christ’s call. This theme is thus closely linked to the life and mission of priests and of consecrated persons.”

God calls us all to be part of his Church, which continues Christ’s presence and action in the world. Within the Church, God calls different people to different roles - not just for themselves (although obviously they will benefit from following God’s call) but for the service of the whole Church. To discern one’s vocation is to figure out what role in the Church one seems best fitted for. In human terms I think this means a particular vocation appears attractive in some way and seems a good fit for one’s personality, talents, etc. As Isaac Hecker said, “grace does not set aside, but answers, purifies, elevates & invigorates nature,” I believe God gives each of us the grace to follow through on what our natural sensibilities suggest we should do with our lives. Of course, one’s individual judgment can be mistaken. The Church must confirm one’s vocation to a ministry in the Church. There is no true vocation without an affirming call from the Church.

In the history of the Church, there have been some – St. Ambrose of Milan and St. Augustine of Hippo, for example – who accepted a vocation to priestly ministry only in response to the insistence of the faithful. Such stories remind us of two very important points. The first is that a valid vocation requires a call from the Church, which tests and evaluates an individual’s aspiration to ministry. The second is that the entire People of God has an important role - and responsibility – in fostering and evaluating vocations. Dioceses and religious communities have “vocation directors” who do this full-time, but all of us in a sense are – and need to be – “vocation directors” for the whole Church. Whenever we recognize in someone signs of suitability for the life and ministry of a priest, we need, for the good of the whole Church, to challenge him to hear that, and then encourage and support him in his discernment and commitment.

Walter F. Murphy (1929-2010)

Yesterday, I learned of the death of one of my former academic mentors in graduate school, Professor Walter F. Murphy. I only had one course with him, but that was the beginning of a fruitful relationship in which I was the beneficiary of both his brilliance and his unfailing kindness, a great source of support in my quixotic pursuit of an academic career and in my subsequent transition to my present vocation.

By the time our paths crossed in the early 1970s, Professor Murphy had already lived an interesting and accomplished life. After graduating from Notre Dame in 1950, he became an officer in the Marine Corps and saw combat in Korea, for which he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the Purple Heart, a Presidential Unit Citation, and three battle stars. After Korea, he taught Government at the United States Naval Academy, then studied at the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. in 1957. He joined the Politics faculty at Princeton in 1958 and became Princeton’s McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence in 1968, a title he held until his retirement in 1995. During those years, he served as a member of the Committee on Judicial Conduct for the Supreme Court of New Jersey, a State Commissioner of Civil Rights, and on an advisory committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. His first book, Congress and the Court (1962), won the Merriman-Cobbs-Hughes Award from the American Academy of Public Affairs.

Although my primary field of study was political theory, rather than American politics or constitutional law, I was privileged to be employed as his research assistant for part of my time as a graduate student. At that time, voice-mail was far in the future. Professor Murphy, however, was a pioneer in the then quite uncommon practice of using an answering machine to filter his phone calls. When you called him, you heard: “This is Walter Murphy. I have disconnected my phone so that I may work …” Most of the time, he really was working in his study, but he could hear your message. So, if he judged it worthy of an immediate response, he would pick up the phone and interrupt you. As his research assistant, I could count on him almost always picking up the phone when I called – a not inconsequential privilege for a lowly graduate student in the highly hierarchical world of academia!

As his assistant, I helped him research papal ecclesiology in preparation for his 1979 novel The Vicar of Christ, which won a prize from the Chicago Foundation for Literature. The novel’s hero is a certain Declan Walsh, a Marine Medal-of-Honor winner in the Korean War, who goes on to become Chief Justice of the United States. After his wife’s death, Declan Walsh resigns from the Supreme Court and becomes a Trappist monk, but then is surprisingly elected Pope by a deadlocked conclave.

May the angels lead him into paradise; may the martyrs come to welcome him and take him to the holy city, the new and eternal Jerusalem.

Deacons

Today’s 1st reading (Acts 6:1-7) recounts a conflict between two groups of 1st generation Jerusalem Christians and the solution – the selection of 7 pastoral ministers chosen from among the Greek-speaking Jewish-Christian community and their commissioning by the 12, who prayed and laid hands on them.

The Church has traditionally seen in this story the beginning of the order of deacons, one of the three orders within the sacrament of Holy Orders. Thus, when ordaining a deacon, the bishop prays: In the first days of your Church under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit the apostles of your Son appointed seven men of good repute to assist them in the daily ministry.

I heard those words prayed over me 24 years ago, on April 19, 1986. Of course, I did not know then that I would remain a deacon for over 9 years!

The men who serve as “permanent” deacons do so largely for free, their time generously given to the Church in addition to their commitments to married life, their families, and their careers. Their contribution to day-to-day parish life in the United States has been enormous. “Transitional” deacons receive the same sacred order but function more like apprentices preparing for ordination and lifelong ministry as priests.

In my own prolonged diaconate, I somewhat straddled that divide, beginning and then ending again as a transitional deacon, but for most of the years in between inhabiting a kind of no-man’s land – neither in training to be a priest nor living the life of family and career of a permanent deacon. It was not an experience I would ever have asked for, but the ministries I engaged in during those years taught me a lot that I might not have learned otherwise and formed me to be the priest I am now.