Expanding the Church's Horizon

 

One of the distinctive features of the Easter season is the daily reading of the Acts of the Apostles, which takes us back to the earliest Christian communities and their unique experience of the ongoing presence of the Risen Christ in their midst. Reading Acts, we get to experience vicariously the inspiring internal life of those apostolic Christian communities, living their own kingdom as a religious alternative to the empire in which they remained enmeshed.

 

I felt some of that inspiration during last month’s Paulist Summit on Polarization, ambitiously subtitled Bridging the Divide, Seeking Reconciliation. Participants included Paulists and Paulist Associates, academics, Catholic media figures, and others involved in various initiatives directly or indirectly aspiring to reduce the toxic affective polarization which is poisoning secular society and infecting even our life together as Church. The conference created opportunities for us to learn about how we experience one another and how to navigate through and around our differences, the obstacles which the ways we experience our differences create that hinder opportunities for conversation, and the human and religious resources we can draw upon to attempt those challenging conversations. The weekend was a powerful experience of Christian community, not unlike (it seemed to me) the communal reinforcement and encouragement those early Christians must have experienced in their local Churches. 

 

Primarily, however, Acts recounts the Church’s growth and expansion from a small group huddled together in one room in Jerusalem to larger and increasingly more diverse communities throughout the Mediterranean world. It’s the wonderful story of how, transformed by the Risen Christ’s parting gift of the Holy Spirit into a missionary movement that spread from Jerusalem to Rome, the Church changed from a small Jewish sect into a world-wide Church with a universal mission.

 

To us, who already know the story, all that seems obvious and inevitable. For the first Christians, however, it must have seemed like one new learning experience after another. Today’s 1st reading [Acts 10: 25-26, 34-35, 44-48]recounts one pivotal point in that process. Peter, as the official leader of the community, had visited the disciples in a town called Joppa (near today’s Tel Aviv). While there, he had a dream of various animals and heard a voice tell him to eat them. When he responded that he had never eaten non-kosher meat, he was told, What God has made clean, you are not to call profane - another example of something the meaning of which may seem obvious to us, but which at the time must have seemed completely perplexing. Meanwhile, as Peter pondered this perplexing dream, emissaries from a Roman centurion, Cornelius, came and asked Peter to accompany them back to Caesarea, which he promptly did. That is where today’s reading picks up the story.

 

Cornelius was a Roman pagan, an uncircumcised Gentile! Normally, no devout Jew would enter his house, but these were not normal times. Already “prepped” by his perplexing dream, Peter crossed that boundary, and proclaimed the Good News of Jesus to a house full of Gentiles. Suddenly what had happened to the original disciples on Pentecost happened to Cornelius and his household – a “Pentecost for pagans,” as it has been called.  So, Peter asked, “Can anyone withhold water for baptizing these people, who have received the Holy Spirit even as we have?”

 

Thus began the momentous change that enabled Christianity to spread throughout the wider world. I say “began,” because, of course, the full implications of something so unexpected took time to sink in. Had Cornelius become a Jew and then acknowledged Jesus as the Messiah, he would have been like the other early Christians, who were, of course, also Jews who acknowledged Jesus as the promised Messiah. Cornelius, however, did not become a Jew. He “jumped the line,” so to speak, directly into Christianity. Eventually, the Church would have to debate whether this was proper, and Peter would cite this transformational event as the key to understanding God’s will for his Church – that it be the vehicle for conversion and repentance for all, without exception and without restriction.

It was God who took the initiative in all this – directing Cornelius to invite Peter, prepping Peter with his dream, and then dramatically demonstrating God’s plan to include the Gentiles by giving them the Holy Spirit. For his part, Peter, as the official leader of the Church, recognized God’s action and accepted its implications, baptizing the first Gentile Christians and incorporating them into the community.

 

This story speaks volumes about the very nature of the Church – not just the first century Church of the apostles, but the global Church of the twenty-first century, which is, if anything, more diverse than ever before. The Church is not a club, a fraternal association, a social networking group, or even a prayer group, though it may have elements of all those things. As Pope Pius XI put it, almost a century ago: “The Church has no other reason for its existence than to extend over the earth the kingdom of Christ and so to render people sharers of his saving redemption.” 

 

As a practical matter, of course, we experience the Church largely locally, as part of a locally defined parish community that nourishes and supports us in our faith. It brings us together to hear the Good News that makes our lives different from what they would otherwise have been. It brings us together to respond to that Good News with worship and prayer, support for one another, and service to others in the day-in, day-out dying and rising that defines a disciple’s life. 

 

But it doesn’t stop there. In the movie Civil War, there is a strange interlude when the journalists drive through a town that seems to be pointedly ignoring the civil war being fought all around them, weirdly separated from the experiences and concerns of their fellow citizens. The Church does not enjoy that option, but rather has been appointed, as Jesus says in today’s Gospel [John 15:9-17] to go and bear fruit that will remain.

 

The parish is never just about itself, but in some sense is challenged take in the entire world, today’s world - to expand our horizon, just as the apostolic Church had its horizon expanded, to understand our own local experience of Church as one with that of the young, emerging Church in Africa, the aging Church in Europe, and the even more ancient Churches in India and the Middle East, along with newer Catholic Churches in Asia and elsewhere, to understand how our own middle-aged American Church is being rejuvenated and revitalized by many new immigrants, and in other unexpected ways, to understand our own local experience of Church in the wider terms of God’s great plan for the salvation of the world.

Homily for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, May 5, 2024.

 

1968 Redivivus?

Campus violence is in the news, all over the news. Of course, most young people of college age are not students at four-year colleges or universities. And most of those who are do not attend elite institutions like Columbia. Even so, the media has focused intensely on this issue. And many of those who think or write about what is happening on our campuses cannot resist recalling 1968.

I was 20 years old in 1968, now widely regarded as the most tumultuous year in modern American history, and I remember it well. That miserable year began with the Tet Offensive at the end of January, then Eugene McCarthy's surprisingly good showing in New Hampshire in March, which provoked RFK's entry into the presidential race and LBJ's unexpected withdrawal. In early April, Martin Luther King was killed, and cities erupted in riots.  Then, later in April, Columbia University suddenly experienced a week of campus disorder, which presaged a pattern of campus disorders that would characterize 1969 and 1970 (including as I well remember at my own City College campus one subway stop north of Columbia). In June, RFK was assassinated. Then, in August, the Democratic Convention in Chicago was disastrously overshadowed by unprecedented street violence, all of which combined, unsurprisingly, to elect Richard Nixon in November of that year.

In 1968, the U.S. was mired in a losing war in Vietnam. Hundreds of thousands of young Americans were being killed. The LBJ-haters, who disrupted campus life and then brought their hatred of him and the Kennedy-Johnson Administration's war to the convention, undoubtedly had a variety of motivations - among them in at least some cases actual support for North Vietnam and the Viet Cong. Whatever their motivations, the one clear consequence was the election of Richard Nixon, who gave us another four years of war, Republicans on the Supreme Court, and eventually Watergate. What a proud roster of accomplishment!

And now we appear to be at it again! The U.S. is not actually at war this time, but our ally Israel is. The Biden-haters, who are currently disrupting campus life, again undoubtedly have a variety of motivations - some of them genuine humanitarianism but among them in at least some cases expressions of outright anti-semitism and support for Hamas. Whatever their motivations, the one most plausible political consequence will likely be the election of Donald Trump, which promises at least another four years of "American carnage," and maybe MAGA Forever!

Meanwhile pundits and professors are falling all over themselves to defend free expression and the right of student activists to protest on campus. One wonders if the object of the protesters' hatred were some group other than Jews whether as many pundits and professors would be so libertarian - or whether they might instead revert to the (until recently) obsession at many universities with censoring hate speech and guaranteeing "safe spaces" for students. 

Of course, freedom of expression is an important American value, and students should have ample opportunities to participate in peaceful protests which are non-violent and do not disrupt other students' rights to receive an education and participate in campus life. That said, college and university students do not obviously enjoy any particular privileges in this matter, more than the rights to free expression and peaceful protest enjoyed by other, ordinary citizens in other public and private places. This latter point is often lost amid laments about the role of the police. There is, in fact, a reasonable and legitimate argument to be raised regarding the over-militarization of contemporary policing. That said, being a student at an elite institution should not, a priori, exempt one from legitimate policing activity, to which other, ordinary citizens are also subject. It is not "academic freedom" to block access to public spaces, classrooms, and libraries and to threaten Jewish students with the result that they are afraid to access those spaces (thereby losing their "academic freedom").

One side story in this larger saga, which has received much less attention, is what this tragic turn of events reveals about the current state of higher education in the U.S. - especially at elite institutions. As one who spent several formative years at an elite institution of higher education, on the margins of and aspiring to become a part of that academic world, I am increasingly saddened by what seems to have befallen the collective life of the academic community.  What would it take for faculty to reclaim their role and recommit their institutions to become again genuinely intellectual communities committed to a more coherent educational purpose?

That is all another issue for another day, however.  Likewise, the war in the Middle East is obviously an important issue that deserves political discussion and debate. A terrible atrocity was committed by Hamas. on October 7. Since then, thousands of Gazans - many of them presumably civilians - have died, been injured, made homeless by the subsequent war, while some 132 Israelis remain hostages of Hamas seven months into this conflict. Like the wider war, the underlying Jewish-Arab conflict of which this is a part, the issues seem so intractable. That said, it is incumbent upon the Biden Administration to be as pro-active as possible in facilitating a settlement, however limited and temporary. 

Meanwhile, however, I have little doubt that the primary accomplishment of the Biden-hating campus demonstrators - especially if they continue and take their street show to Chicago - will be helping Donald Trump get elected, much as their predecessors in 1968 helped guarantee Richard Nixon's election. 

Photo: Columbia University, NY Times.

The 1960s In a New (and Loving) Key

 

Historian and Pulitzer-Prize winner, Doris Kearns Goodwin has been around and producing great books since I was in grad school. Her latest is a bit different and somewhat special. In An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s (Simon and Schuster, 2024) she is still doing history, but within the context and through the unique lens of her marriage to "Camelot" veteran Richard Goodwin, her husband of 42 years. The book takes the form of a recollection of the written memories in archival boxes of her and her husband's personal and political experiences, primarily during the eventful decade of the 1960s, with some reflections on their earlier pre-political lives and the post-political trajectory of their married life together.

Richard "Dick" Goodwin (1931-2018) liked the portrayal of him in the movie Quiz Show: "I'm he moral center of the story. I'm portrayed but a young good-looking guy. And I get to sum it all up with the last line, 'I thought we were going to get television. The truth is, television is going to get us'." (That would prove prescience in many respects.)

Yet, already while interviewing contestants in the late 1950s Quiz Show scandal, Dick Goodwin was already heading toward his life-defining work as an aide and speechwriter first for John F. Kennedy, then for his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, and then, after having been so much a part of the start of the Great Society, leaving he White House and becoming an anti-war activist and an aide and speechwriter first for Eugene McCarthy, and then for Robert F. Kennedy (and then McCarthy again). 

Most of the book is about Goodwin's work with those four men and his role in helping shape the liberal accomplishments and the eventually catastrophic liberal losses of the 1960s. For those of us who lived through that tumultuous time (and may have our own complicated memories to unpack), Goodwin's recollections recall the aspirations and disappointments with which we are so familiar and with which we are still living today. They also fill in the historical record with interesting personal anecdotes that personalize the story and highlight how that history was very much neither happenstance nor the working out of inexorable historical forces, but the unique intersection of distinctive personalities with the needs of a society in the grip of generational and cultural change. 

Even remembering the intense emotions of the era and the negative polarization its politics produced, one cannot fail to be struck by the intensity of Goodwin's involvement first in the New Frontier and then in the politics of producing the Great Society. The latter was rooted in the conviction that "Johnson's domestic agenda spoke directly to our daily lives," but was followed so soon by what his wife would call his "spiteful, personal vendetta against Johnson." Indeed, so much of the story of the 60s as recalled here can be categorized as a sad story of spiteful personal vendettas - most notably RFK and Kennedy loyalists spiteful personal vendetta against LBJ, but also the hostility between the McCarthy and Kennedy wings of the anti-war Democrats. Not only did those personal vendettas damage the people involved and undo the aspirations of the Great Society, but they set the stage for the more negative and destructive political dysfunction of subsequent decades.

Doris Kearns Goodwin met her husband in the 1970s, in the afterglow of the 60s and Goodwin's era of influence. Younger than he, she had participated in the earlier events of the 1960s at what might be called the street level. But her service as a White House Fellow and the friendship she formed with President Johnson became her ticket to academic renown, with her first book Lyndon Johnson's and the American Dream. From there she would go on to write acclaimed books about Lincoln, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Theodore Roosevelt. It is interesting to observe how her academic engagement with those heroic figures and her personal engagement with Johnson helped steer her toward a more balanced perspective on the 60s.

It is the fashion nowadays to compare our problematic present not to the 1960s but to the mid-19th-century run-up to the Civil War. Drawing on her knowledge of Lincoln, Doris Kearns Goodwin recalls how the young Lincoln "was troubled by the mood of the country, a tendency to substitute passion for judgment, to engage in mob action in disregard of laws." Lincoln worried that the "living history" of the revolutionary era "was fading, along with the founding generation itself." For Goodwin, "Lincoln's words took on a powerful resonance," as she realized that "some sixty years after the changes and. upheavals of the Sixties have begun to fade, been half-forgotten or become misunderstood," this project might add their voices "to the task of restoring a "living history' of that decade, allowing us to see what opportunities were seized, what mistakes were made, what chances were lost, and what light might be cast on our own fractured time."

One of the particular beauties of this book is how it integrates the personal with the political and the past with the present. It is an account of a married couple in their old age (he in his 80s, she in her 70s) reflecting back on the history they had originally lived separately and in which both played active parts. It is an amazing insight into how we all may remember our past in old age and be nourished even now by those memories, both positive and negative. It reminds us of the vision of history-shaping public service and the animating power of a life lived in public service. And, of course, it is an even moire poignant reminder of the pre-eminence of love in life, of the primary importance of marriage and family, even within a life blessed by opportunities for historically significant political participation.

Jesus and the Powers

 

N.T. Wright, a retired Bishop of the Church of England, is an eminent and well-known scripture scholar and theologian. In this latest book, Jesus and the Poers: Christian Political Wirness in a Age of Totalitarian Terror and and Dysfunctional Democracies (2024), he and his co-author, Australian theologian Michael Bird, seek to address in straightforward, non-technical language the perennial question of the Christian commitment to politics and government, a question that has acquired increased salience in a post-Christendom world, in which the once widely acclaimed alternative of liberal democracy has become increasingly problematic. Indeed, for these authors, this presetn decade may "be the most precarious and perilous time in human history since the 1930s."

The authors stress something that many modern progressives insouciantly seem to be increasingly eager to forget, namely that both the Latin West and the Greek East were and have continued to be "shaped by a Christian vision of God's love for the world and the place of Christian virtues in societies where few restraints on evil and exploitation existed." This is an inescapable historical fact, but it is also much more than that. It is of the very nature of Jesus' kingdom, which, while completely unlike the kingdoms of this world, "is still for this world, for the benefit and blessing of this world, for the redemption and rescue of this world."

The theological claim is that "the Creator intends his world to be run through obedient human beings." God, the authors insist, "intends that humans should share in running his world, and should be held accountable." Thus, "because we believe that Jesus is King and his kingly power is operative among us," Christians "cannot retreat to the attic of spiritual affairs, not when there is a gospel to proclaim and ahurting world crying out for healing and hope."

In this post-Christendom context, the author's preference is clearly for a form of liberal democracy, a form of political arrangement which seems to have lost a lot of its former luster and appears increasingly threatened. The authors aregue that "in a world with a human propensity for evil, greed and injustice, liberal democracy stands as the least worst option for human governance." It is, they stress, "neither a necessary not a sufficient conditon for a just society, but it can be an enabling condition for a just society."

In a world in which no political axiom can any longer be taken for granted, the authors offer a valuable religious argument for invigorating liberal democracy. This is especially timely when the ideas that have underpinned liberal democracies find themselves challenged not just by populist authoritarianism but by explicitly religious versions such as messianic imperialism (e.g, Russia) and a revived Catholic integralism.

Wonders Never Cease

This weekend, I have been attending a conference on overcoming toxic political polarization, "Bridging the Divide, Seeking Reconciliation," organized by the Paulist Fathers. Perhaps that is what is disposing me to be more charitable to someone I would normally be less inclined say a kind word about, namely the present (perhaps temporary) Speaker of the House, MAGA right-winger Mike Johnson. But the main reason must be that, for whatever reason or reasons, the Speaker suddenly seems to be sounding like an old-fashioned politician, like (dare I say?) a 20th-century "Reagan Republican." Perhaps the Speaker's rediscovery of reality reflects, as some pundits have suggested, the fact that he now has access to high-level Intelligence about the international situation. Whatever the reason, having weirdly and pointlessly delayed needed aid to Ukraine for months since President Biden requested it. the Speaker now endorses such aid and is taking the necessary steps to move that aid forward through the absurd and arcane procedures of the House. To advance the legislation to its final (hopefully successful) outcome, the Speaker has needed - and has received - the votes of  Democrats in the House.

In our ailing, if not terminally ill, political culture, this may be one of the rare occasions when democracy wins, when the will of the majority of elected representatives (reflecting a majority in the country at large) get to pass something necessary and good, despite the usually successful obstruction by a minority of the members. Adjusting the gender to the present House membership, this has up until now been a clear case of what Woodrow Wilson lamented in 1917, when he spoke of "A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, [who] have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.”

Of course, in this case, today's "little group of willful men" and women primarily represent the isolationist and self-serving opinion of one person, the MAGA Republican former (and would-be future) President Donald Trump. There has, alas, always been an isolationist tendency in American culture. There have always been Americans who, for whatever reason, fall for destructive rhetoric like Trump's persistent complaint that our European allies have not spent enough of their money on Ukraine and that, therefore, the U.S. is being taken advantage of. 

So democracy wins also - and maybe even more importantly - in Ukraine, where that beleaguered country may yet be able to hold back the advancing forces of imperialist Russian tyranny. A Ukrainian collapse would move the front-line for civilization's defense dangerously to the border of Poland, to the very border of NATO.

Back to America, it still remains to be seen what this may portend for congressional ability to function, as it was once intended to function, now in these waning months of this present congressional term.

That said, it is good for the country that Democrats are rewarding the Speaker for his rediscovery of reality and his unexpectedly responsible behavior. The prophet Ezekiel famously said: if a wicked man turns from all his sins which he has committed, and does what is lawful and right, he shall surely live. None of the transgressions which he has committed shall be remembered against him; because of the righteousness which he has done, he shall live. Whether the Speaker still keeps his gavel despite the MAGA minority's inevitable fulminations and motions to vacate the Chair, still remains to be seen. At the moment, however, this seems like a win for democratic governance at home and democratic survival in Ukraine. That deserves to be celebrated - as does the surprising Speaker of the House himself.