Walking

This afternoon, I decided to do a dry run getting to and from the site of my "studium," presumably hoping to eliminate in advance at least one more of the many accumulated sources of anxiety and dread as I anticipate the first day of class on Monday. So I took the #62 bus to the Ponte Vittorio Emmanuele, then walked over to the next bridge, Ponte Principe Amadeo d'Aosta, to cross the Tiber. (The Royal Family may have been ousted in 1946, but their names are on enough places and streets that they certainly won't be forgotten!). Once across the river, it was a shot (uphill) walk - up the Gianicolo to the Pontificia Università Urbaniana on the Via Urbano VIII. The guard was friendly, but explained that the building were all closed and I would have to wait till Monday to go inside the building where the class will be held.

My companion and I then walked along the Via Gianicolo, past the gated North American College and the headquarters of the Equestrian order of the Holy Sepulcher to the park-like area around the Garibaldi Monument, which offers a panoramic view of the City below - and the snow-capped mountains in the distance. Then we walked back down the hill - appropriately, like the Magi, returning by a different route, that took us through the most familiar sections of Trastevere, past several famous churches, among them Sant' Egidio and Santa Maria in Trastevere. Churches are always popular stops for tourists, but especially in this Christmas season, when each church shows off its praesepio. Even "secular" sites have such nativity scenes. I was quite taken with the tall Christmas Tree and illuminated praesepio on display right in fron of the Vittoriano (the famous monument to Vittorio Emmanuele II, dedicated just over 100 years ago, when Church and State were still so vehemently at odds in Italy).

It was a lot of walking. Rome, like New York, is often described as a walking city. Knoxville, for all its many other charms, is not a walking city, and I have sadly gotten out of the habit of walkign to places since moving there. Rome, however, is a city whose stone pavements can be hard on one's feet (and disastrous, I suspect, for one's shoes). So I was worn out considerably by the time we caught the bus at largo Argentina and returned home. But I was glad, not just that I had satisfied my original purpose in checking out the route to Monday's class, but also that I had had the endurance to walk again after my current sedentary and automotive life, however worn out i was from the infelicitous pavements.

Three cheers for urban pedestrian life!

Epiphany in Rome

My plane landed early at Fiumicino. The ordeal of travel ended fairly easily after that, as the driver sent to bring me to the Paulist Residence at Santa Susanna quickly made it into the City through streets empty of rush-hour traffic on this chilly, beautiful, holiday morning. Tired and out-of-sorts from lack of sleep and hungry from the long flight, I shut out the light (on this the great festival of light!) and went to bed, not really sleeping but at least at ease. Then I awoke to the mundane business of trying to figure out where to go for my first class this coming Monday - and to the happy announcement that there will be a Consistory here in Rome next month, at which (among others) Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York will be created a cardinal of the Holy Roman Church.

At home in the US, the Epiphany is increasingly little-noted. It hardly helps that in recent decades we have been relocating it to Sunday - liturgically comparable, I suppose, to the curious practice of so many of our once-serious secular holidays now being moved for convenience to Mondays. In many public paces in the US, the decorations are down already and "the holidays" are unambiguously over. In many homes, however, a kind of folk-memory persists that keeps the Christmas Tree up and the lights on until January 6, whether with or without much consciousness of the original significance of the 6th. At least here, La Befana still comes bringing gifts. As long as her generosity perdures, Epiphany will endure!

A Roma!

In 2006, the Paulist Fathers General Assembly resolved to promote the canonization cause of Paulist Founder, Fr. Isaac Thomas Hecker (1819-1888). In January 2008, the Archbishop of New York, Edward Cardinal Egan, formally opened the process for Hecker’s cause. During that ceremony at the Paulist “Mother Church” in New York City, the parish Hecker began and the church where he lies buried, I formally assumed the office of Vice-Postulator, appointed to assist the Postulator of the Cause in spreading knowledge about Hecker and promoting popular devotion to him. Now, four years later, I find myself on this 12th Day of Christmas, about to fly to Rome to participate in a program sponsored by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in Rome – essentially a course on the ecclesiastical process of canonization (and taught in Italian!!!) - that will begin on Monday, January 9, and will continue through mid-March. While in Rome I will be living with the local Paulist community near the Paulist Church of Santa Susanna on the Via Venti Settembre, near the Quirinale Palace.

By 1921, the Paulists Fathers were ready to establish a formal residence in Rome to house the community’s official representative to the Holy See – something especially desirable for a specifically American community which otherwise lacks the international dimension which world-wide religious orders easily have. As an American community, the Paullists were also interested in acquiring a church to minister to the growing American population in Rome. Near the American Embassy, they found Santa Susanna – an ancient Roman parish church, which in recent centuries had been attached to a convent of Cistercian nuns and was rarely open to the public. President Warren Harding interceded with the papal Apostolic Delegate, and Pope Benedict XV soon authorized the Paulists to use Santa Susanna as a national church for American Catholics in Rome. The first Sunday Mass at Santa Susanna for the American community was celebrated almost 90 years ago on February 26, 1922. With a brief interruption during World War II, the Paulists have been in Rome at Santa Susanna since then.

I am certainly looking forward to living at Santa Susanna and to being in Rome, the center of the Church (however apprehensive I honestly am at the moment about passing this course – and especially about having to learn in a foreign language!) It may not be exactly how I personally would have chosen to spend the next couple of months, but I am reasonably confident that it will work out well for me, for the community, and of course for Hecker’s Cause, which I hope to be able to advance as a result of this experience.

So, it’s off to the airport in a few hours and a whole new adventure in the Eternal City!

After Iowa

Iowa, we are repeatedly told by political pundits and other analysts, is an atypical state. Undoubtedly that's true. By far, one of the most atypical things is the Caucuses - covered to death in the past several months and now done with for another 4 years. Whatever their other merits or demerits, the Caucuses are a form of democracy the likes of which we seldom see elsewhere - a form of democracy that an Aristotle, for example, might have found comprehensible. Of course, the Iowa campaign has become more media-driven, and attack ads are as effective as everywhere else (as Newt Gingrich learned). Still, at the Iowa Caucuses citizens actually do what citizens in the classical sense are supposed to do. They meet. They discuss. They deliberate. They stand up and say why they are for the candidate they are for. Would that we could incorporate more of that in our political processes!

Iowa, because it is different and unrepresentative, may also accordingly appear over-rated. Undoubtedly it is. But it does shine a light, however briefly, on what citizenship might mean.

The actual contest that has just been completed in Iowa has also perhaps highlighted the class-conflict within the Republican Party. Four years ago, it was the Democrats whose contest pitted an elitist-oriented candidate (Obama) vs. someone (Hilary Clinton) with strong appeal to what we used to call the "working class." Since the late 1960s, we have been accustomed to the internal conflict within the Democratic Party between its powerful elitist wing (interested in reshaping the cultural and moral fabric of American society) and its traditional "working class" base, progressive diminishing in influence within the party. Now that many of those folks are Republicans, we may be seeing something similar happening there. This year it may be the Republicans' turn to showcase the class divide between the economic elite that Romney can appeal to and the kind of "working class" constituency someone like Santorum comes out of and could conceivably represent. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.

2012

On New Year’s I often like to recall what the late comedian George Burns once wrote in The New York Times: “Growing up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, I always looked forward to New Year’s mainly because it was the only thing we could afford that was really new. And we always believed that things were going to get better during the New Year.”
New Year’s – especially the run-up to the end of the old year – lends itself to both nostalgic and serious reflections both about the state of the world and about one’s life, about where one has been so far and where one may be going in whatever time may yet be allotted. But New Year’s, as George Burns’ comical comment reminds us, is, by definition, something new, a gift freely given us that offers an opportunity for hope. Someone said to me recently that he looks forward to 2012 full of hope because, at the very least, at the end of this new year, the election will be over. The only problem with that, I reminded him, is that by the end of the new year the next election campaign will have already begun!
Elections aside, however we approach the beginning of a new year, hope has to be a part of it. To be sure, for all our holiday cheer, many of us may be marking the end of another very difficult and challenging year of economic and personal struggles by looking ahead to 2012 with more than a little anxiety. Speaking for myself, I must confess that I find myself at the beginning of this new year feeling lots of additional anxiety! As you know, in just a couple of days, I’ll be leaving you all for almost 3 months on an assignment I did not seek. Fortunately, it’s only temporary. Even so, all transitions are stressful. Being bounced around from place to place gets harder and harder the older one gets, and having to listen to (and try to understand) two hours of class everyday in a foreign language – at my age - is a challenge, about which I am more than a little apprehensive. It’s not for nothing, after all, that we pray every day at Mass that we may be safe from all distress, as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.
But, if my distress and anxiety as I begin this new year are real enough, so too – if I am to practice myself what I preach to others – so too must be my hope, the hope we all share as Church, the hope we have been proclaiming this Christmas season, and on which we must all rely in all things and at all times, all the year round: the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.
Our hope is founded and focused on Jesus Christ, the one whose birth 2000+ years ago is the very basis for the calendar we mark today. When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman – Mary the Mother of God and the Mother of the Church. He was born under the law – that is, he was a member of the Jewish People, circumcised on the 8th day of his earthly life, in fulfillment of God’s covenant with his Chosen People. God’s showing up in the world in Jesus – born to a particular mother, of a particular nation, in a particular place, at a particular time in human history – has realigned all of time and given all of history a new and more hope-filled meaning, giving us a hope for the future we would never otherwise have had.
Time has always been very precious – precisely, I suppose, because we have only such a limited supply of it. By becoming part of our time, however, God has turned our limited time on earth into a time of unlimited opportunity. So today he invites us to receive this new year – this year of our Lord 2012 – with gratitude as his gift and to enter it not in fear or anxiety, but with the hope that counts as one of God’s greatest Christmas gifts to us.
Happy New Year!
Homily for New Year’s Day, Solemnity of Mary the Mother of God, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, January 1, 2012