Rejoice?

 

Traditionally, this third weekend of Advent marks a transition from the more penitential and apocalyptic aspects of Advent to a spirit of joyful expectation as Christmas approaches. Of course, Christmas (as we observe it now) has been in constant celebration for almost a month already. Yet, speaking personally, this year I have found it hard to get too much into the Christmas spirit. Perhaps, as we age, time seems to pass faster, and thus Christmas has just crept up on us quicker and caught me busy about other things and otherwise unready. Or maybe, despite the surrounding Christmas ambience, this really just isn't a very joyful time in 2024 America.

By any measure, this has been a difficult year. Personally, for me, it has been a year of health challenges - knee replacement surgery and rehab, covid (twice), sleep problems, etc. It has also obviously  been a very difficult year for our country - and our wider world. Enough has been said already about the election and its ramifications in terms of national divisions, political polarization, and loss of trust in our institutions and in one another. This has also been a year of wars, international and civil, and all the human and social suffering that inevitably accompany such conflicts. Add to all that the natural calamities we have increasingly experienced - fires and drought, not just in California but also in New York and New Jersey, complemented elsewhere by storms and floods! Yes, this has been a difficult year!

Rejoice in the Lord always.
I shall say it again: rejoice!
Your kindness should be known to all.
The Lord is near.
Have no anxiety at all, but in everything, 
by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, 
make your requests known to God.
Then the peace of God that surpasses all understanding 
will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

[Philippians 4:4-7]

However jarring it may feel this year, this traditional Gaudete Sunday message is the season's much needed corrective to the malaise many may understandably be experiencing at the present moment. It reminds us that Christmas comes faithfully in good times and bad, in peace and in war, in prosperity and recession, in unity and division. Hence the perennial appeal of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas - famously introduced by Judy Garland in the 1944 musical Meet Me in St. Louis.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Let your heart be light
Next year all our troubles will be out of sight

Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Make the yuletide gay
Next year all our troubles will be miles away

Once again as in olden days
Happy golden days of yore
Faithful friends who were near to us
Will be dear to us once more

Someday soon we all will be together
If the fates allow
Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

Of course, we today, no more than Judy Garland in 1944, fully expect all our troubles to be out of sight and miles away. The carol, for all its sad and melancholy vibe, is an invitation to hope, which is, of course, the spirit of Christmas.

On this Gaudete weekend, we are invited to take the nearness of the Lord seriously as our entry into the peace of God that surpasses all understanding, which makes Christmas something deeper and more fulfilling that the ephemeral lights of December and sounds of the season.

Birthright Citizenship

Since my mother died in 2020, I have been in possession of her first passport - actually my grandmother's Italian passport from 1929, which included my mother and two of her older siblings. The title page reads (my translation): In the name of His Majesty Victor Emmanuel III, by the grace of God and will of the nation, King of Italy, the Minister of Foreign Affairs grants this passport to Signora Nunzia Orlando [my grandmother], wife of Francesco Bonaccorso [my grandfather], with her children Virginia and Salvatore and the foreign child Carmelina [my mother].

Francesco and Nunzia Bonaccorso had first immigrated to the U.S. in 1920 with Virginia and Salvatore and three older children.  In 1922, my mother was born here in New York and was thus, by birth, according to the provisions of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution a natural-born U.S. citizen. Soon after, while the three older children stayed in New York to work, my grandparents and their three younger children returned to Italy. from which they finally returned to New York in 1930. Immigration was difficult after 1924, but my "foreign child" mother's American birthright citizenship made it easier to reunite the family in the U.S. Thank you, Birthright Citizenship!

Among the many mischiefs being contemplated by the incoming Administration is an attempted attack on the constitutional principle of birthright citizenship. Yet the authors of the 14h Amendment (adopted 1868), left no ambiguity about the Amendment's citizenship provision: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

This provision overruled the Supreme Court's infamous Dred Scott decision (1857) that African-Americans were not and could not become U.S. citizens. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 had granted citizenship to all people born in the United States if they were not subject to a foreign power, and this clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was obviously intended to constitutionalize this provision permanently. Subsequent jurisprudence has clearly affirmed that this clause applies to all children of non-citizens born in the United States under any circumstance. 

A direct assault on birthright citizenship (presumably by executive order) would, of course, be challenged in the courts. While the jurisprudence is clear, the Trump Supreme Court is now known for its notorious indifference to legal precedents. We will have to wait and see, possibly at the cost of considerable social disruption and personal suffering in many immigrant families.

Photo: 1929 Passport photo of my grandmother Nunzia Orlando Bonaccorso and her three younger children, my uncle Salvatore, my aunt Virginia, and the youngest, my American-born mother. Carmelina (Camille).

The Forever Health Insurance Crisis

 

Let it be stipulated that last week's hit-man style murder of UnitedHealthCare CEO, Brian Thompson, a fellow citizen and a human being, who was also a husband and a father of two children, was a serious crime and a grave moral evil. No one should applaud murder. Nor should anyone take lightly the increasing valorization of political violence in our society.

That said, what should be made of the varied reactions to this tragedy, including widespread lack of sympathy for the victim and even some apparent glee over what some may perceive as revenge against the for-profit health insurance industry? At minimum, maybe this is yet another symptom of the terrible coarsening of our society and the disappearance of traditional moral notions and expectations of appropriate behavior. 

Stipulating all that, however, what else does this say about the widespread anger and frustration over the state of health care in America? The Times quoted this comment on Tik Tok: “I’m an ER nurse and the things I’ve seen dying patients get denied for by insurance makes me physically sick. I just can’t feel sympathy for him because of all of those patients and their families.”

Indeed, for-profit Health Insurance Companies deservedly occupy an increasingly notorious and infamous place among the objects of widespread popular anger and resentment among American people today. 

Yet, an alternative to our dependence on profit-making private insurance has long been available. It is called Medicare-for-All. If the Vietnam War had not short-circuited the Great Society, we might have made real progress in that direction decades ago - perhaps by a progressively lowering of the minimal age to qualify for Medicare. It is well known that President Nixon was willing to consider Medicare-for-All in 1973, but the Democrats - to their eternal discredit - did not jump at that chance to fix our health care system once and for all.

Medicare is much more efficient than private insurance, which wastefully spends a lot of its resources on denying and preventing rather than providing health care. Moreover, Medicare is widely accessible and publicly funded, as health care ought to be in an affluent society. 

Of course, an oligarchic government dominated by billionaires, whose main concerns seem to be tax cuts for themselves and reducing regulations that protect the public instead of their private profits, such a government is not likely to move in the direction of Medicare-for-All or any other serious improvements in our health-care system. If RFK, et al., were really serious about making America Healthy Again, they might start with resolving our forever health insurance crisis. But it is a safe prediction that no one will.

Notre Dame Reopens

 

This weekend, the great cathedral Notre Dame de Paris has reopened after a destructive fire five years ago and an heroic reconstruction and restoration project that cost some 700 million euros. Notre Dame is, of course, a great historic and artistic monument, a masterpiece of French art and culture, and a site for so many major events in French history, from the wedding of Henri IV to Napoleon's coronation to DeGaulle's Liberation Day Te Deum. Its reconstruction and restoration necessarily concern the wider French society and its secular Republic, which, of course, actually owns the building (as it does all pre-20th-century French churches). So President Macron's outsized role in orchestrating this reconstruction and restoration and his very visible presence in the glorious ceremonies surrounding the cathedral's reopening are appropriate. Visiting the restored cathedral last week, President Macron called it "overwhelming." Indeed, Notre Dame belongs to all France - indeed, to the world. Hence the presence of other world figures - among them U.S. First Lady Jill Biden and President-Elect Donald Trump, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Prince of Wales, and numerous others from Europe and beyond.

That said, Notre Dame is - and remains - first and foremost a cathedral, the center of the Catholic Church in Paris. If the fire that engulfed it and threatened its survival may in some sense be seen as symbolic of the challenges that face the Catholic Church in today's troubled world, the cathedral's reconstruction and restoration - and its glorious reopening as a place of prayer for all peoples - may likewise be treated as a sign of hope, an encouraging sign of what Isaac Hecker would have called "a future for the Church brighter than any past."

Photo: The Virgin of Paris, a medieval statue saved from the fire at Notre Dame returned in procession to the cathedral last month.

St. Nicholas Day

 

This morning I celebrated the Community Mass in our House Chapel for today's feast of Saint Nicholas (270-343), the Bishop of Myra in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey). According to legend, he attended the great Council of Nicea (325), the 1700th anniversary of which will be commemorated during the forthcoming Jubilee Year. He is especially remembered for his anonymous acts of charity, most famously for throwing three bags of gold into a poor household to provide dowries for three sisters. Centuries later, Saint Nicholas still comes in person in parts of Europe - notably the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria - and there are many popular traditions connected with his visit on the eve of his feast, some of which have survived in the most unexpected places. In December 1981, when I was a Paulist novice in rural northern New Jersey, December 6 fell on a Sunday. That morning, we all awoke to find a stocking outside each of our doors, with various personally appropriate items chosen for us by our devoted novice master. 

In 19th-century New York, Clement C. Moore famously re-costumed Saint Nicholas into our contemporary Santa Claus.  Santa has since spread all over the world, overshadowing his original persona as a saintly 4th-century Bishop. Sadly, today's department-store Santa serves instead the devilish demon of profit and is thus at best an imperfect intimation of the spirit of Saint Nicholas. Still, some of that spirit survives even in spite of everything. Whether acknowledged or not, Santa's amazingly generous gift-giving each Christmas still celebrates the amazing generosity of God who gave the world the gift of his Son at Christmas and continues to do so for the rest of history in the life of his Church. The real St. Nicholas responded to God's great generosity concretely in his own faithful and holy life of generous love for others in need. And, whether attired as the real bishop he was or as Clement C. Moore comically re-costumed him, he continues to exemplify God's generosity and call us to imitate it.

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Photo: my toy Santa Claus, originally given to me by a family friend for my first Christmas in 1948. At that time, it was a new model, and it sang Jingle Bells when you turned the little handle in his back. Old now (like its owner), the handle no longer works, and Santa no longer sings Jingle Bells. But, otherwise, he seems to have held up pretty well these past 76 years!