Countdown

Nolite timere: quinta enim die veniet ad vos Dominus noster. ("Fear not: for on the fifth day our Lord will come to you").

In the commercial shopping universe, the countdown has been going on for weeks. "Only 5 (shopping) days left till Christmas," continues the relentless refrain that began on Thanksgiving, if not before. But, in the Church's calendar, only once does such a countdown (minus the "shopping" reference, of course) appear. On December 21, the antiphon at the Benedictus bids us "Fear not, for on the fifth day our Lord will come to you." Unlike the shopping countdown, which seems intended to intensify anxiety as Christmas approaches (lest I face it with my shopping still incomplete), the Church's one-time countdown commands the opposite: "Fear not."

It's a mystery to me why December 21 was singled out for this, why only 5 days left till Christmas merited such attention - unlike, say, the 40th day before Christmas, or the 9th, or the 7th, or even the 3rd (all numbers with traditional religious resonance). I really don't think, though, that the number is the key here. I don't think the point is "Fear not" because it's just 5 days to go instead of 6! I think the point is rather that the time has come, and so we should take to heart that traditional biblical greeting and "Fear not."

Easier said than done, of course, given our world-wide economic woes, our national political dysfunction, and - closer to home - the perennial personal problems that periodically punch each one of us in the stomach without regard to timing! But then that is the point really. The biblical "Fear not" was not addressed to the well off, the safe, the comfortable. It was addressed to those who might have good reasons, humanly speaking, to be afraid. Christmas comes - not just five days from now but all the time - to a frightened world full of frightened people, whose only reason not to be afraid, really, is the good news that is at the heart of the Christmas story: our Lord really has come to us!

Fraternity

Four decades ago, when I was in graduate school studying such things, a great 20th-century student of American political thought, Wilson Cary McWilliams, wrote a book called The Idea of Fraternity in America (U. of California Pr., 1973). This year, Pope Francis himself has made fraternity the subject of his 2014 World Day of Peace Message , "Fraternity, the Foundation and Pathway to peace."

Now, I admit I've never been much excited by either of the last century's accretions to the calendar of the Christmas season - neither the feast of the Holy Family (originally on the Sunday after Epiphany, then moved in the new calendar to the Sunday after Christmas), nor the "World Day of Peace" invented by Pope Paul VI in 1967 and somewhat awkwardly attached annually to New Year's Day. I don't know how many World Day of Peace  Messages I've actually read. But, even if I did read them, I can't actually recall the content of any. But such is the excitement that daily still seems to surround "Person of the Year" Pope Francis that I eagerly anticipated and read his first such message, issued a few days ago. And I was not disappointed!

In the heart of every man and woman is the desire for a full life, including that irrepressible longing for fraternity which draws us to fellowship with others and enables us to see them not as enemies or rivals, but as brothers and sisters to be accepted and embraced. So begins Pope Francis' 2014 World Day of Peace Message.

Fraternity, the Holy Father continues, is generally first learned in the family, which the Pope calls the wellspring of all fraternity and the foundation and the first pathway to peace, since, by its vocation, it is meant to spread its love to the world around it. That may be a tall order for many actually existing families, but it testifies to the importance family holds in the human imagination. After all, everybody begins life, biologically at least, as a member of a family. Families come in all kinds and shapes and sizes, but family life in some form remains universally the basic unit of social organization. And for most people it remains the focus of their day-to-day lives. Thus, even those of us without families of our own treasure our extended family connections and family-like connections.

One of the striking things about God’s relationship with the human race, as revealed in both the Old and the New Testaments, is how it is largely a series of family stories - beginning with the creation of a family, from whom the whole human race is descended. In his World Day of Peace Message, the Pope refers to the problematic story of that first family, in which  we see the origins of human society and the evolution of relations between individuals and peoples. From the tragic story of Cain and Abel. the Pope says, we learn that we have an inherent calling to fraternity, but also the tragic capacity to betray that calling. Jumping forward to Jesus' teaching about his and our Father, we find the basis of all fraternity to be found in God's fatherhood - not some generic fatherhood, indistinct and historically ineffectual, but rather the specific and extraordinarily concrete personal love of God for each man and woman. It is this specificity, I think, that grounds us biblically, for the biblical stories (as the accounts read at Mass in these last ferial days before Christmas illustrate) portray a state of affairs in which God is intimately and directly involved in the human world.

Pope Francis cites his predecessor's reminder in Caritas in Veritate on the link between poverty and the lack of fraternity. In many societies, Francis notes, we are experiencing a profound "poverty of relationships" as a result of the lack of solid family and community relationships. We are concerned by the various types of hardship, marginalization, isolation and various forms of pathological dependencies which we see increasing. Addressing our contemporary crisis of income inequality, the Pope recalls the Church's teaching on the so-called "social mortgage" - the principle that, while it is lawful for people to have ownership of goods, "they possess them as not just their own, but common to others as well, in the sense that they can benefit others as well as themselves." (The Pope here quotes Gaudium et Spes 69, referencing also Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum, John Paul II's Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, and the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church.)

The necessary realism proper to politics and economy, the Pope concludes, cannot be reduced to mere technical know-how bereft of ideals and unconcerned with the transcendent dimension of man. When this openness to God is lacking, every human activity is impoverished and persons are reduced to objects that can be exploited. Only when politics and the economy are open to moving within the wide space ensured by the One who loves each man and each woman, will they achieve and ordering based on a genuine spirit of fraternal charity and become effective instruments of integral human development and peace."

All of which brings me back to Carey McWilliams' famous book  (which sadly I no longer own!), which saw in American history more than the dominant "liberal" tradition, so often seen as univocally expressing American values. Echoing the earlier analysis of de Tovqueville, McWilliams recognized the powerful role of communitarian association and resilient religion in shaping American society and culture and ameliorating the more individualist dominant "liberal" tradition. Of course, both community and religion have for some time been under stringent assault - from the libertarian forces of modernity on the economic right and post-modernity on the cultural left.

All the more reason then to recall a notion that is not just some alternative tradition to modern and post-modern individualism, but is also at the heart of human history, experience, desire, and hope.

A Shameful Anniversary

On December 19, 1998, the House of Representatives voted to impeach President Bill Clinton. It was an ugly display of partisanship that both reflected and further helped set and harden the tone of our public life, with consequences both tragic and farcical which we as a society now live with as the political normal. (Clinton himself, as everyone expected, was acquitted in the Senate. He completed his term and went on to be one of our most popular and successful ex-presidents. So much for the House of Representatives' blatant attempt to nullify the national will as recently expressed in a presidential election!)

 

The way history was taught when I was in school in the 1950s and 1960s, the  infamous impeachment and trial of Andrew Johnson was presented as a partisan power-grab that, if successful, might have turned the U.S. into a parliamentary system. America was, we were taught, saved by one vote from the disgrace of having had a president removed from office. (Whether Andrew Johnson was in any way, a worthy occupant of the office is another issue.) 

 

Then came Watergate, and history was revised. We rediscovered impeachment as a legitimate - if extreme - political remedy. But I fear we learned the wrong lesson in both cases. From the first, we went further down the road of not trusting our established constitutional procedures to be still serviceable in the modern world. (The most obvious example is that of the congressional war power.) From the second, we went further down the road that leads to the quasi-criminalization of political differences.

 

There may be a point of no return beyond which a political culture has so degenerated that civility and decency can no longer be recovered. If we are not there yet, we are certainly getting perilously close. It's certainly a good thing that the Congress has finally managed to pass a budget. But all the inside-the-Beltway self-congratulation for accomplishing what used to be a normal expectation is equally certainly overdone. I am old enough to remember when such normal behavior as passing a budget was part of a larger process of actually legislating. Dare I hope to live long enough to see that again?

"An Adventure in Faith"

Today, December 18, is the 196th anniversary of the birth of Servant of God Isaac Hecker (1819-1888), the founder of the Paulist Fathers. On his first birthday as a Catholic, Hecker wrote: "It is my 25th birthday; here let me offer myself to Thee for Thy service oh Lord. Is it not what I should? Am I not Thine? Thou didst create me and ever has sustained me. Thine I am. Accept me oh my God as thine, a child who needst most thy love and protection" (Diary, 1844).

Not unlike Christian history’s most famous seeker, Saint Augustine, Isaac Hecker exemplifies the spiritual search at its best. Like Augustine, he examined as many as possible of the leading intellectual and religious currents of his time, before finally finding his permanent religious home in the Roman Catholic Church. The very personal story of his spiritual search, of his intense attention to his own inner spiritual sense, certainly speak to the spiritual longings of many in our own time, who identify themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” For most of the first 25 year of his life, Hecker too was “spiritual but not religious.” But Hecker did not remain that way. For Hecker, seeking was never an end in itself. The point of seeking was to find. Once the object was found, the search ceased. Hecker found fulfillment in the Catholic Church and never either regretted what he had found or desired to look farther, but rather 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.  “It never can be too often uttered that Catholicism means the Universal Good and True and Beautiful,” Hecker confided to his Diary on that same 25th birthday. “That is not worthy to be named Catholicism which does not embrace al truth, all Goodness, all Beauty. Our allegiance is alone due to God and to Catholicism because it is the universal revelation of God. The measure of Catholicism is the measure of Gods love to man. I am a Catholic because I would not reject any of Gods Truth.”

Thus, all of Hecker's activity after his conversion was characterized above all by his enthusiastic embrace of the Church to which his personal spiritual search had so earnestly led him, and which would in time transform him into an active, enthusiastic missionary. Hecker’s enthusiasm for his new faith and his commitment to the Church permeate all his activity and his writings – from his initial conversion experience as recorded in his Diary, through his active ministry as a priest and missionary preacher, to his final mature exposition of his theology in his last book The Church and the Age, published in 1887, the year before he died..

 

Hecker’s life after his conversion exemplified his enthusiastic embrace of the Church to which his  youthful spiritual seeking had led him and to which he henceforth wholeheartedly devoted himself. This commitment to the Church as the institutional expression of the presence and providential action of the Holy Spirit sustained him in his priestly ministry. Thus the opposition he encountered that led eventually to his founding the Paulists was, he wrote to his brother in 1858, “permitted by Divine Providence” to position him “to further the work of God.” In his own time and in his own circumstances, Hecker lived and witnessed to the "Joy of the Gospel," which Pope Francis is challenging the Church to live and witness to  in our own time and our own circumstances

Hecker was truly, as Edward Cardinal Egan has written, “a man of the Church,” whose life was “nothing less than an adventure in faith” (Catholic New York, November 9, 2006).

 

Person of the Year

So Pope Francis has been named Time Magazine's "Person of the Year." Considering who some of the previous honorees have been and who some of this year's runners up were, it may seem a somewhat ambiguous honor. Still an honor is an honor, and good publicity for the Church is to be welcomed. Only two previous popes have been honored with this accolade of celebrity - Blessed John XXIII in 1962 and Blessed John Paul II in 1994. Surely, the Pope appreciates (as should we) not just the perils but also the possibilities that accompany his current celebrity status. History is not always encouraging on this score, but certainly popularity can also attract interest and generate real receptivity to serious substance. Certainly the unprecedented attention being paid to his recent Post-Synodal Exhortation offers reason to hope that that may be happening and that the world may be really paying attention to the substance of the Pope's message.

Of course, not all the attention has been positive. Writing in Millennial, an online journal and blog that features the insights of Catholic millennials on the pressing issues of our time, Robert Christian has analyzed the growing backlash against the Pope on the American political right. Such "free market absolutists," as he calls them, "are right to recognize the fundamental incompatibility of economic libertarianism and the pope’s vision." The pope, Christian suggests, "is a threat to their delusions and designs - to their imagined vision of what America was, distorted vision of what it is, and disturbing vision of what it should be." (See http://millennialjournal.com/2013/12/09/the-pope-and-the-president-tackle-inequality-and-how-we-should-respond/)

In the end, this conflict between competing visions of the American dream reprises the conflict that has been at the heart of modernity between competing visions of human well-being. Economic libertarianism and its political correlates (once known as "liberalism") have been challenging the supports on which society rests (and in extreme cases even the concept of society itself) for centuries. And in the process they have unleashed a complementary social and moral  libertarianism that has become a governing paradigm on the Left - leaving little room for a vision of society and human well-being which is both more socially cohesive and morally challenging.

Political extremism of any sort - right or left - is problematic in a society. It is an interesting contemporary phenomenon how so many sincerely religious people have come to embrace a socio-economic agenda that seems to coexist so uncomfortably with the tradition and teachings of the Church.  Perhaps the present popularity of the Vicar of Christ and the attendant publicity are a providential invitation to us politically polarized Americans to step back and recognize the incompatibility of such a partisan agenda with the mission of the Church