Paul E. Sigmund (1929-2014)

Late last night, I learned of the death of one of my academic mentors, Princeton Professor Paul E. Sigmund. Paul was the Director of graduate Studies in the Politics Department when I arrived at Princeton in 1972 as an idealistic graduate student. In fact, he was the first faculty member I met, when I took the bus there one summer day in 1972 to get a better sense of what exactly I was getting myself into that fall. He was a great professor, a helpful adviser, and in time a good friend. I last saw him about 10 years ago, when I visited the University shortly before his retirement.

By the time our paths crossed in those tumultuous early 1970s, Paul had already been living an interesting and accomplished life. Born in Philadelphia, he had been an undergraduate at Georgetown, then studied for a year the University of Durham on a Fulbright, before going to graduate school at Harvard, where he got his Ph.D. His doctoral dissertation was published as Nicholas of Cusa and Medieval Political Thought. Meanwhile, in the 1950s, he had also served as a political analyst for the Air Force at Wiesbaden, Germany. He started teaching at Princeton in 1963. He was married to Barbara Boggs, daughter of Democratic Congressman Hale Boggs of Louisiana (who died tragically during my first semester at Princeton) and his wife Lindy, who replaced him in Congress and eventually served as Ambassador to the Holy See. Paul and Barbara were a wonderful couple, who contributed greatly to the life of the Princeton community, where Barbara was mayor from 1984 until her death (at only 51) in 1990.

Academically, Paul had two main areas of expertise - political philosophy (particularly medieval political thought) and Latin American politics. He was the author of The Ideologies of the Developing Nations (1963), Natural Law in Political Thought (1971), The Overthrow of Allende and the Politics of Chile, 1974-1976 (1977), and Liberation Theology at the Crossroads (1990). He also edited the Norton Critical Edition St. Thomas Aquinas on Politics and Ethics (1987).

Paul was a very down-to-earth academic and an easily approachable person. In March 1974, a group of us graduate students invited him to dinner at the Graduate College to celebrate the 700th anniversary of the death of Thomas Aquinas. I remember we bought Chilean wine for the occasion! When I passed my General Examination that May, some classmates held an impromptu party in a friend's apartment on Nassau Street, which Barbara Sigmund showed up at. Paul encouraged me to teach and was instrumental in my getting interviewed for my first (and only) full-time academic job at Marquette University in 1977. 

Paul was a life-long devout Catholic, whose career corresponded chronologically to the multiple stresses and challenges which faced the Catholic Church in the second half of the 20th century. His academic work in medieval political thought and in the contemporary politics of Latin America  well equipped him to understand and navigate through those stresses and challenges. Regrettably, I will be unable to get to Princeton for his funeral Mass this Friday. But I will certainly be remembering him at Mass here.

Requiescat in pace!

"It is the Saints who give direction and growth to the Church"

After all the anticipation and the gathering of pilgrims from all over the world (including a group from our own Knoxville Diocese), after the singing of the Litany of the Saints and the Veni Creator, the Final Petition was made to the Pope: Most Holy Father, Holy Church, trusting in the Lord's promise to send upon her the Spirit of Truth, who in every age keeps the Supreme Magisterium immune from error, most earnestly beseeches Your Holiness to enroll these, her elect, among the saints. To this final petition, the Holy Father responded, exercising his infallible magisterium: For the honor of the Blessed Trinity, the exaltation of the Catholic faith and the increase of the Christian life, by the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, and our own, after due deliberation and frequent prayer for divine assistance, and having sought the counsel of many of our brother Bishops, we declare and define Blessed John XXIII and John Paul II to be Saints and we enroll them among the Saints, decreeing that they are to be venerated as such by the whole Church. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Now the Church rejoices in two more saints, two saints who were unusually influential in the life of the Church and in the affairs of the world, two saints who together helped define the Church and its relation to the world in the second half of the 20th century - Saint John XXIII who convoked the Second Vatican Council and Saint John Paul II who guided the Church in interpreting and implementing the Council as it entered - as a truly world Church - into Christianity's 2rd millennium.

In his homily, Pope Francis reminded us "that it is the saints who give direction and growth to the Church." The Pope connected the charisms of these two great 20th-century popes with today's feast of Divine Mercy and its gospel account of Jesus revealing his wounds to Thomas. "They were priests, and bishops and popes of the twentieth century. They lived through the tragic events of that century, but they were not overwhelmed by them. For them, God was more powerful; faith was more powerful - faith in Jesus Christ the Redeemer of man and the Lord of history; the mercy of God, shown by those five wounds, was more powerful; and more powerful too was the closeness of Mary our Mother."

Calling Saint John XXIII the pope of openness to the Holy Spirit and Saint John Paul II the pope of the family, Pope Francis concluded his homily by looking ahead to the forthcoming Synod on the Family. "May these two new saints and shepherds of God's people intercede for the Church, so that during this two-year journey toward the Synod she may be open to the Holy Spirit in pastoral service to the family. May both of  them teach us not to be scandalized by the wounds of Christ and to enter ever more deeply into the mystery of divine mercy, which always hopes and always forgives, because it always loves."

Saint John XXIII, pray for us!

Saint John Paul II, pray for us!

Saints and Miracles

When talking about the canonization process, I have often called it the most democratic thing in the Church - in the sense that no one is going to get canonized in the absence of authentic popular devotion. If there were any doubt about the authenticity and widespread character of popular devotion to soon-to-be Saints John Paul II and John XXIII (photo), the amazing assemblage of pilgrims now gathering in Rome should certainly be sufficient to dispel any such doubts. It is obvious where the People of God are on this issue!

Admittedly there has been some grumbling.  Some grumbling concerns the way in which Blessed John Paul's cause seems to have been "fast-tracked." Of course, in the past other saints have been "fast-tracked" too. Saint Francis of Assisi was canonized just 2 years after his death. Saint Thomas Becket was canonized within 3 years of his death. Both were examples of figures who generated a medieval equivalent of 2005's "santo subito" - the popular demand to see John Paul canonized soon. In fact, I can remember a TV commentator at the time of John XXIII's funeral describing the popular reaction as similar to "canonization by acclamation," as it might have happened in the earliest centuries of the Church's history. The point is not popular acclaim, per se, but the special witness of a particular person's holy life (or martyrdom) which generates that popular acclaim that matters and that needs to be examined, tested, and verified.

In this regard, it is the requirement of proven miracles that, I think, can best serve as a corrective to haste. A reputation for heroic sanctity may reflect the  short-term tastes and fashions of a particular historical period. What the test of the miracle requirement contributes to the process is subjecting a legacy of popular acclaim and a reputation for heroic sanctity to some external validation that is the closest we can come on earth to an expression of divine approval of a Servant of God's cause. 

There are arguments being advanced that would favor further reducing the requirement for miracles not just on occasion but in general. Obviously, there have been cases where the miracle requirement has been dispensed with. Pope Francis has dispensed with the requirement of a second (post-beatification) miracle in the case of John XXIII. And he has also already employed the alterantive of "equivalent canonization" in several recent cases - among them, the early Jesuit St. Peter Faber. Of course, there are circumstances which warrant such special action. But I would hope not to see momentum develop in favor of further reducing the number of required miracles as a general rule. 

That said, it certainly is, I think, a very good thing that the overall process has evolved so as to facilitate many more canonizations than in the past. After all, the Church is a lot larger than in centuries past, and so many more saints are correspondingly needed to dramatize the power of God's transforming grace at work in the lives of diverse types of people in all segments of this world-wide Church.

Two New Saints

On Sunday, at Saint Peter’s in Rome, Pope Francis will celebrate the much awaited canonization of two great contemporary popes – John XXIII (Pope 1958-1963) and John Paul II (Pope 1978-2005), henceforth Saint John XXIII and Saint John Paul II.

I was only 10 when John XXIII (photo) became pope – and all of 15 when he died. Yet I can remember his pontificate well and the transforming impact it had, with consequences continuing into the present. I think, however, that one of the best ways really to get to know Saint John XXIII and appreciate his spirituality is to read his famous (and still in print) Journal of a Soul, a collection of spiritual notes and reflections written by him over the course of his life, beginning in 1895, when he was in the seminary at Bergamo in northern Italy, through 1962. “My soul is in these pages,” Pope John said to his secretary, when he gave him these journals for future publication. For the grand sweep of the events of his actively busy life and his role on the world stage, one must look elsewhere – to the various biographies already written and others which will undoubtedly come out in the future. But Journal of a Soul reveals the future pope’s inner life, the heart of the saint. It is steeped – as Saint John XXIII was all his life – in an intensely lived traditional Catholic piety, which may make reading it somewhat challenging to today’s tastes, which are so different from his, but it is well worth the effort. In his final journal entry, written mere months before his death, Saint John summarized the “great graces bestowed on a man who has a low esteem of himself but receives good inspirations and humbly and trustfully proceeds to put them into practice.” One of those graces was “To have been able to accept as simple and capable of being immediately put into effect certain ideas which were not in the least complex in themselves, indeed perfectly simple, but far-reaching in their effects and full of responsibilities for the future.” His success in doing this, he wrote, “goes to show that one must accept the good inspirations that come from the Lord, simply and confidently.”

Saint John Paul II had a much longer reign, during which he was able to exercise a very direct impact on many different areas of the Church’s life. From a geopolitical standpoint, he will always be remembered as the first non-Italian pope in centuries and the only Pope from behind the Iron Curtain. His pontificate will likewise be remembered for its effect in Eastern Europe and for the providential part it may have played in the collapse of communism. In the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, which had so strongly stressed the ministry of bishops, the election of someone who had made his mark mainly as a diocesan bishop (and in communist Poland, no less) signified the Church’s ready response to the need to implement the Council’s teachings in the day-to-day reality of local Church life and to confront forcefully the new challenges being thrown at the Church by radically new political, social, and cultural changes of the 20^th century. At the Mass at which he formally inaugurated his ministry as pope, Saint John Paul famously challenged the modern world: “Do not be afraid. Open wide the doors for Christ.” That remains the Church’s mandate in this new 21^st century, the first century of Christianity’s 3^rd millennium, into which soon-to-be Saint John Paul led us and in which we must now continue.

 

On earth as it is in heaven

This afternoon, I went to the movies and saw Heaven Is for Real, a film about the a 4-year old's "near death" experience of heaven and its impact on his family and his local Church community. The film is based on a book about an actual case. I know nothing about such "near death" experiences. I have read none of the literature. (Nor have I read the book on which the movie is based.)

In my ignorance, I may be wrong; but my uneducated guess is that such phenomena represent in a secularized society something like what mystics and other visionaries have historically experienced in their purported visions of heaven (and/or hell). The special experiences of mystics and visionaries occur in a context of faith - that of the visionary and that of the community to which the visions are communicated. Contemporary claims of "near death" experiences may be less explicitly rooted in faith and are being shared with a much more skeptical society. So their meaning and function may be more varied and more open to diverse interpretations.

The story is that Reverend Todd Burpo's son, Colton, while near death and being operated on for a ruptured appendix, has an experience of heaven in which he meets Jesus and some relatives he'd never met (his great-grandfather, and also his miscarried sister, whose existence he had never before been aware of). The movie explores the impact of the boy's revelations on his father, his mother, and their local Church community. Whatever else may be said on the subject, the film is certainly well made, and the acting is superb - especially Connor Corum as young Colton Burpo, who does a fantastic job of playing an otherwise ordinary, normal kid, who has an extraordinary experience, but somehow still remains "normal."

What I found especially striking about the film is how it portrays the surface ordinariness of people's lives. (Of course, as in most ordinary lives, there is the burden of pain and suffering just below the surface - an earlier miscarriage in the case of the Burpos, a Marine son's death in the case of Church member and friend Nancy Rawlings). Apparently Todd is a popular pastor, but he is underpaid as a minister. Like Saint Paul, he has to make his own living in his rural, small-town Nebraska community, and he is having a hard time of it. In addition to multiple jobs, he is also very involved in the life of his community - not just as a pastor but as a volunteer fireman, for example. The movie goes on for quite a while before Colton's illness,  portraying the joys and stresses of the Burpo family's ordinary activities and the events that go on in their small-town, rural community. These include getting injured in a local softball game and a case of kidney stones - all before the son's sudden sickness.

After Colton's recovery, ordinary life appears to resume. Only gradually does Colton reveal the details of his experience. There is something very authentic in the almost matter-of-fact, un-strategized way Colton mentions first one detail, then another. He is, of course, only four; and the innocent, unassuming way he shares his revelations certainly adds to their credibility.

Of course, everyone - including Todd himself - is troubled by the revelations and would at first prefer some other explanation for what has happened. The story seems less about how first Colton's parents, then others, come to believe, than it is about the effect that their encounter with Colton's experience has on them. 

What is being presented is less a story of an extraordinary vision than it is an account of how the extraordinary can penetrate the ordinary, and how the painful wounds which burden ordinary life can be healed by the extraordinary's intrusion into the ordinary. It is not so much about getting a glimpse of heaven as it is about allowing the reality of heaven to make a difference in daily life.

What a powerful message for Easter time!