A Very Unenviable Precedent

In these contentious times, when the epithet "fascism" is tossed about so frequently and easily, with little or no historical consciousness, it seems to me to be beneficial to review aspects of real historical fascism and how it was experienced a century ago. I refer, of course, to the movement and regime which invented the term, Fascist Italy, which experienced the rise, rule, and catastrophic collapse of fascism over the course of a little more than two decades in the early-mid 20th century.

So, in addition to watching MUBI's Italian drama, Mussolini, Son of the Century, (a dramatic fictionalized version, which nonetheless effectively illustrates the abject failure of the political class and its liberal constitutional order of king, parliament, and political parties, to check Fascism's ascent to power), I have also recently re-read the most comprehensive history of the subject with which I am familiar, R.J.B. Bosworth, Mussolini's Italy:  Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945 (NY: Penguin, 2006). And I have accompanied that by re-reading the classic journal of one of the participants in the disastrous finale of Italian fascism, The Ciano Diaries 1939-1943 (Doubleday, 1945), the diary kept by Benito Mussolini's son-in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano (1903-1944), during his ears as Italy's Minister for Foreign affairs.

Writing in the wake of the post-Cold War reshaping of Italian politics, Bosworth provides a thoroughly comprehensive appreciation of post-Risorgimento, post-unification early 20th-century Italian politics and culture. Bosworth highlights the limitations of the Risorgimento project of a united liberal Italy. One familiar feature of that failure was emigration. "In 1913, the year when departures peaked, 407,475 Italians entered North America, 148,850 the countries of South America and 307, 627 left for Europe, France and Germany." The U.S. has greatly benefited from Italy's failure, but it remains united liberal Italy's failure. Bosworth quotes Olindo Malagodi's claim that emigration was the most obvious token of "national inferiority." 

Notably, the rise of the fascist dictatorship came as a consequence of the First World War. Technically, Italy was one of the war's winners, but it hardly felt itself to be such, suffering what was famously termed la vittoria mutilata. "Most workers and virtually all peasants hated the idea of conflict and at least the latter often knew little about the nation except as a malign conscripting and taxing force." It was not just that "inadequate roads symbolized the partial and erratic penetration of the state into Italian lives," Liberal Italy also lacked charisma. "Perhaps because the Italian nation was so partially made and its institutions so uncertainly framed, perhaps because King Victor Emmanuel III was not physically imposing, ... perhaps because the countering charisma of the Catholic Church .... was still so uneasily integrated into. national identity, quite a few Italians can be found engaged in wartime quest for a duce." While little of that early 20th-century Italian experience may appear all that relevant to contemporary American politics, certainly the pervasive sense of institutional liberalism's failure even after its ostensible victory in the Cold War and the desire for charismatic strong leadership have obvious resonances with what happened a century ago.

Fascism rose to power in Italy in the context of significant social breakdown, strikes, and political street violence. According to Bosworth, some 3000 Italians died as a result of political and social instability between the end of the war and October 1922. Thankfully the U.S. has experienced nothing quite comparable in the 21st-century. (Actually, compared to other 20th-century tragedies, "Italians got off lightly," a factor which. may have contributed to what Bosworth calls "the softness, compromise, confusion or lack of rigour of Italian Fascism, compared with later fascist movements.")

Bosworth has written an excellent narrative of Italian Fascism's rise, its imperialist aspirations, its ill-fated alliance with Germany, and its tragic denouement. That is all familiar territory. Throughout. however, it is an account of two simultaneous, if seemingly somewhat contradictory factors. The first is the exposure of the weakness of the liberal constitutional order (king, parliament, political parties) and their failure to oppose fascism effectively (until belatedly and irresponsibly at the end). This has its parallel of a sort in the breakdown of the constitutional order of checks and balances in our own contemporary context. The second was the weakness of the system, due to its failure either to abolish completely the constitutional alternative (always present as a threat in the king) or to penetrate more profoundly into the traditional and apolitical depths of society, where "out in the towns and countryside, ideology was perpetually conditioned by Italians' recourse to familial and other forms of loyalty and patronage whose cast was as frequently local as it was Italian, let alone Fascist."

The U.S is not Italy, and the de-centralizing, apolitical forces which have historically conditioned American civic society have often been praised in positive contrast to the more traditional and familial forces militating against civic society in Italy. That said, at least before we began "bowling alone," the presumed strength of local and associational identities among Americans could be seen as a strong bulwark against any serious ideological or other centralizing authoritarian movement. Churches have been particularly hit hard by the "bowling alone" phenomenon, but may still be able to draw upon simmering reserves of spirituality - especially the Catholic Church, blessed at this historical juncture to have an American Pope. 

In this regard, what Count Ciano wrote in his Diary may appear applicable here and now as well as there and then: "Superficially, maybe, they [Italians] scorn the Church, but they are religious at heart, and especially in times of peril do they draw near the altars." 

In my reflections on the Mussolini phenomenon and its applicability (or not) to today, I have likewise continued to be impressed by Ciano's Diary, which, as Bosworth remarks, "remains one of the great texts for any who seek to understand the Fascist regime." In many ways, Ciano is a revealing personal portrait of regime hangers-on, whether in Italian Fascism or in more contemporary approximations of authoritarian-adjacent movements and  governance. He also lifts the curtain on the flawed characters to whom fell the responsibility to check the dictatorship's power.

At a formal level, the checks and balances were still there (as they are here), but those charged to exercise those checks temporized. Thus, for example, as early as March 1940 (early not in terms of the history of the dictatorship but of its disastrous foreign war policy), Ciano records that "the King feels that it may become necessary for him to intervene at any moment to give a different direction to things; he is prepared to do this and to do it with despatch." In historical fact, of course, it took the King another 3 years and 4 months to act. Some "despatch"!

Such was the sad story of Italian fascism, which, propelled into prominence by the political, social, and economic calamities of World War I and its aftermath, was maintained in power by the institutional weaknesses of the liberal constitutional order and the personal and political failures of those charged with maintaining it (king, parliament, political parties). History does not repeat itself, but there is much to learn from what happened in Italy a century ago - a lesson and a warning.

Happy Halloween

“A pity – I miss all the Vigils. Why on earth were they suddenly suppressed?” wrote Thomas Merton in his journal on December 7, 1959. One of Merton's lost vigils was today's Vigil of All Saints, one of the many casualties of the rigid, liturgical ideology that disparaged vigils and inspired much of the Catholic calendar reform of the mid-20th century.

In its secularized form, however, as Halloween, this vigil has not only survived. it has thrived! Halloween is now the second-largest commercial holiday in the U.S., second only to Christmas - thanks to increased consumer spending on costumes, candy, and decorations. (Americans spent  over $11 billion on Halloween in 2024!)

When I was a young "trick-or-treater" back in the 1950s Bronx, Halloween was largely a children's holiday - a mildly transgressive opportunity for kids to dress in costume and extort candy and coins from their neighbors (and even from perfect strangers). Adults did have Halloween parties. Even my parents hosted one once. But "trick-or-treating" was for children. That some adults also now "trick or treat" seems to me to be bizarre, although in a society in which adults have now for decades imitated their kids in how they dress on a daily basis, perhaps it is not so bizarre that they should imitate kids in costume on Halloween as well!

Actually, what I think has happened is that our generation enjoyed Halloween so much as kids that many find it hard to give it up as adults. As such it is now a more extravagant and expensive version of the somewhat silly children's holiday we celebrated decades ago - all about festivity and fun, with only a residual recollection of traditionally transgressive behavior and the frightening imaginings it evoked.  Halloween's haunting, frightening spirit has been safely tamed for this era of "safe spaces." (Compare the witches in today's Wicked with last century's Wizard of Oz.)

 

In the fairy tales with which we in my generation grew up, however, while the ending was usually a "happily-ever-after" one, the route to that happy ending was strewn with wicked witches and other formidably frightening forces. I remember as a child thinking how lucky I was to live in the present, rather than once-upon-a-time when all those wicked witches and dragons and monsters were a regular threat. Of course, as I eventually learned, the witches and monsters were not literally real. But what they represented, the real evils lurking in the world for so much of human history, tormenting human beings and frustrating human hopes, were very real indeed - and still are. 

 

Christianity claimed to have overcome the demonic powers through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, and so started the process of disenchanting our experience of nature, which we increasingly aspired to control and tame to meet our increasing needs. Paradoxically now, nature has been transformed by our efforts to tame it, into an even more threatening apocalyptic monster in the form of humanly caused climate change.

What we now call Halloween (a name which itself reflects its Christian character as the Vigil of All Saints) was originally an ancient pagan festival occurring at a major seasonal turning point in the year, the transition from summer to winter and from one year to the next. Originally a night of fear in the face of the forces of evil, it was incorporated into the Christian calendar late in the first millennium when All Saints Day was moved to November 1. In moving the feast of All Saints to November - from the original May 13 anniversary of the 609 Dedication of the Roman Pantheon as a Christian Church Sancta Maria ad Martyres - the medieval Church was symbolically celebrating Christ's triumph over the demonic elements traditionally associated with the pagan festival we now call Halloween. In effect, this ritualized the triumph of Christianity over older pre-Christian European paganism by celebrating the triumph of God's grace (exemplified in the experience of the saints) over sin and Satan. If Halloween is now an $11 billion-plus extravaganza that now largely overshadows All Saints, perhaps that sadly symbolizes the cultural resurgence of a new post-Christian paganism over a Christian faith increasingly being consigned to society's margins. Dangerously, the Christian concept of Halloween as the celebration of God's triumph over evil has been increasingly replaced by a resurgent paganism, in which the demonic is celebrated as benevolent and even fun!

Fun it most certainly is not, as the consequences of our secularizing disenchantment increasingly extort their toll upon our world and on our relationships with one another and with that world. Most of us no longer fear literal ghosts. Yet everywhere we are haunted by evil spirits of our own creation, traditional human calamities like war and inequality and novel contemporary ones like social media and climate change, which are all coming back to haunt us.

 

We are haunted by demagogues and zombie ideologies that block us from understanding (let alone responding to) contemporary challenges. Way worse, however, we are haunted by our mutual hatreds and a kind of cultural civil war, which the worst among us have for decades now been encouraging us to fight. We are haunted by our divisions, which have weakened us, have separated us from one another, and have paralyzed the collective action called for if we are to face the witches and monsters of our day.

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Covid Politics

 

Most. of us can probably remember dumb things we did during the 2020 covid pandemic. I can remember leaving the mail on the porch for 24 hours for the sun supposedly to kill the virus! Later, when public Masses resumed, we were required to "sanitize" the pews between Sunday Masses. Luckily the musicians took on this task and found a way to do it easily and quickly. Meanwhile, one day I went to the doctor and noticed that nobody seemed to do any thing like that to the chairs in the waiting room. I asked the doctor about it, and he sad they did it once a day, from which I concluded it obviously didn't need to be done, and this was all covid theater!

All that was bad enough, but was exacerbated by the polarized partisan divide through which all covid-era disputes came to be filtered. Holding on to tribal positions - whether on school closings or mask-wearing or whatever - has inhibited us from reexamining what worked and what didn't during the covid pandemic. The time, however, has come to do so, and perhaps - although given our polarized partisan divide that may be utopian - even to learn something which may be of service next time we face a comparable crisis.

To this end, Princeton political scientists Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee have written In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us (Princeton University Press). This is a politically, as well as scientifically focused book, that is, it concerns itself with what should be done in a democracy.

For me, the big news in the book was the fact that the consensus, prior to 2020, was that non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) were thought to be of at best limited value. All the heroic measures that were implemented in early 2020 represented a rejection of the previous consensus by panicked officials influenced by the behavior of China, which embarked on a policy of trying to completely control the pandemic, something not previously aspired to. As the authors put it, "an authoritarian Chines government went to war with Covid, and much of the rest of the world followed. Not for the first time, elite institutions failed us." 

The draconian and restrictive policies adopted in so many places also suffered from ambiguity as to their goal. At the outset, the goal was often seen as temporary, to slow the spread of the disease, to "flatten the curve." Gradually, however, experts sought somehow to minimize the effects long-term which required keeping restrictions in place much longer. "The zero-Covid frame locked policymakers into costly, futile policies with no exit strategy."

There were actually two intersecting issues. The first was whether the various measures proposed and even mandated were actually effective, the case for which seems less than completely convincing. The second, however, is how decisions were made and what constituencies' interests were not insufficiently considered. As is now widely recognized, school closures did enormous harm to children, especially those least advantaged to begin with. And, in general, the policies adopted, while perhaps serving the interests of those the authors call "the laptop class," did not serve the interests of the disadvantaged classes who were the majority of essential workers. "A fundamental error of Covid policy  was to accord too much power to public health experts with a predictably narrow set of professional concerns and expertise, as well as perspectives shaped by comfortable, upper-middle-class material conditions."

"The central message of this book is that several tenets of basic rationality evaporated under the stress of the Covid onslaught. One of the greatest failures, as we have shown, was to weigh the expected coasts of policy against the expected benefits." Over and over again, we are reminded that the public-health mindset tended to consider only one narrow set of costs and benefits. Others needed to be more involved in policymaking to balance that single-minded preoccupation with other economic and social and psychological considerations. The authors are also rightly concerned "about the quality of democratic deliberation involved" and the way policy making "seems to have been driven by a profound form of short-term bias."

The great success story of the pandemic was, of course, the rapid development of a vaccine. "Vaccination rates strongly predict variation in states' covid mortality. Across the period after vaccines were available, states diverged in their outcomes, with the more highly vaccinated (more Democratic) stats suffering less disease than the less vaccinated (more Republican) states. Although vaccine uptake appears to make a big difference for states' Covid outcomes, variation in states' use of non pharmaceutical interventions before vaccines were available does not."

As for those other interventions, the negative effects of school closures were perhaps the worst. At the more individual level, we can all remember the battles over masking. Even then - indeed right from the beginning - there were questions and doubts about the efficacy of mass masking. Yet masks were mandated , and as a pastor i had to enforce that mandate. I had not objection to doing so, but that probably reflected my political allegiances as much as anything else! As with the theatrical sanitizing of seats, perhaps mask-wearing was a comfort, which enabled us to think we were doing something to protect ourselves and each other and thus made us more courageous about doing our work and engaging in other activities. 

As students of American politics, the authors note the unique aspect of federalism. They show how different states adopted different policies, and that politicians on both sides benefited. "If there is any positive spin on the U.S. response to the pandemic, it is that federalism ensured that most Americans seemingly got the policies they wanted, no matter what those policies were (and notwithstanding the lack of evidence to suggest they worked as intended.)

Covid highlighted the contentious issue of expertise in politics. "What is the proper role for experts in a democracy? Is democracy itself antithetical, as. many have argued since antiquity, to government on the basis of adequate expertise? Or can modern representative and constitutional government somehow allow for rule by the many that also draws on the expertise of the few?"

American society was already politically polarized before the pandemic, with "deep cleavages along party lines and a degraded and polarized media environment." Covid, far from uniting society in a common effort and promoting solidarity, just made polarization worse. "We need greater humility and tolerance of disagreement and more honest communication of uncertainty from public health and other experts. We need greater respect for reasonable dissent, especially when it comes from those on the other side of the political spectrum." 

Covid also "shone a harsh light on persistent inequalities in American society" which may have "had much more detrimental effects on pandemic outcomes than any differences in how non-pharmaceutical interventions were employed or enforced."

Neither polarization nor inequality were created by Covid, but their tragic toll and the renewed conflicts to address them may be the lasting legacy of that traumatic experience.

30 Years

 

The Gospel we just heard [Luke 10:1-9] is, by design, the one proclaimed at my ordination in Toronto, Canada, 30 years ago tomorrow. It was also read, five years ago, at my 25th anniversary Mass, at Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN. That was the year of covid. So, my “Silver Jubilee” was a somewhat muted affair. Not completely muted! The Knoxville Symphony’s First Violinist and his wife played. Our cantor brought her professional choral group to sing Mozart’s Laudate Dominum and Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli. But it was otherwise a modest celebration - just the Knoxville house and a few parishioners. Bishop Stika also attended, which I greatly appreciated. Five years later, we assemble today in this very different setting for another even more modest anniversary commemoration.

Now, despite the Lord’s command in the Gospel, I must confess that I have not, to my knowledge, healed any sick these 30 years. But I do hope at least to have been better about fulfilling the rest of the Lord’s command: whenever you enter a city say, “The kingdom of God has come near.” Our world is now very different from 30 years ago, but it remains a world which very much needs to hear that the Kingdom of God is near - and how to find the right road to reach it.

Often enough, I have felt more like Thomas Merton when he prayed; “I have no idea where I am going [and] do not see the road ahead of me.” But, now so many years down that road, I feel closer to Saint Paul, writing to his friends in Philippi: straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus [Philippians 3:8-14].

Like the seed in the parable, I have thrived in the rich soil of the Church, in which God’s grace and mercy have taken root and produced fruit. Like the seed in the parable, I may have been scattered all over the place. But God never gives up, because that is who God is. God never gives up on the commitment he has made to each of us.

In the 15th century, Nicholas of Cusa, whom I once dressed up as at a grad students’ Halloween party in the mid-1970s, prayed this prayer:

Thank you, Jesus, for bringing me this far.                                                                                          In your light I see the light of my life.                                                                                               You persuade us to trust in our heavenly Father.                                                                          You command us to love one another.                                                                                           What is easier?

Well, sometimes certainly it doesn’t seem so easy, does it? So often, the Good News that the Kingdom of God is at hand can come across as no news at all, or, even bad news, or maybe as good news learned once upon a time but long since forgotten. That is why the world so desperately needs the Church to show the world what Good News the Kingdom of God really is, Good News that is actually at hand for anyone and everyone.

I knew that much 30 years ago, although I could not know that I would make it to this day or what path might take me here - an amazingly grace-filled path, punctuated by daily Masses, Sunday Masses, school Masses, Spanish Masses, Italian Masses, Wedding Masses, Funeral Masses, an amazingly grace-filled path from Toronto to New York, to Knoxville,  now back to New York: singing Christmas carols on Bloor Street and blessing Saint Anthony’s Bread, living through the soul-searing sadness of 9/11 and the welcome comfort of weekly breakfasts with parishioners at the Flame, the spiritual uplift of pilgrimages to famous shrines and a summer spent studying at Windsor Castle, the challenge of walking for miles in the pre-dawn dark at World Youth Day in Cologne, and the adventures of saint-school in Rome, then pastor of Knoxville’s historic and beautiful first parish church, and the amazing adventure of chairing meetings, paying bills, replacing a boiler, restoring the church ceiling and climbing the scaffolding to touch a century-old ceiling painting, blogging, e-mailing, and eventually even live-streaming, teaching and learning, preaching, praying with the sick, baptizing babies, burying the dead, caring for a cemetery, now doing some of the same but on a much smaller scale as superior of this wonderful community – all the time being challenged and stretched in ways I had hardly ever expected.

And I still cannot heal the sick.

But I am at least still able to witness how God has revealed himself to us in Jesus our Lord who brings us together in his Church, through which we may have hope that the Kingdom of God really is at hand to heal our broken world - that God’s power is greater than the forces that dominate our world, and so can overcome all the obstacles and worries which, if we let them, will threaten to separate us from God and from the salvation he intends for us.

So, yes, thank you, Lord, for bringing me this far.

And, thank you, all of you, for making this journey with me.

So now may all of us together continue to help one another on our ongoing journey into the Kingdom of God, where the news is always good and true for all.

Homily for my 30th Anniversary Mass, Paulist Mother House Chapel, October 27, 2025.

 

Praying Together

For perhaps the first time ever, certainly the first time since the tragedy of the Reformation, Pope Leo XIV and a British sovereign, King Charles III, accompanied by Queen Camilla and assisted by the Anglican Archbishop of York, prayed together in an ecumenical service of Midday Prayer in the Vatican's Sistine Chapel. (As Prince of Wales, King Charles met with previous popes, as did his mother Queen Elizabeth II, but this was the first time the Pope and a British monarch had formally prayed together.) The event crowned decades of ecumenical dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion, of whose oldest branch, the Church of England, King Charles is the "Supreme Governor." For the King, this visit comes as the culmination of a lifelong personal commitment to ecumenical and interreligious relations and dialogue.

The King also visited the Basilica of Saint Paul's Outside the Walls, where he was formally installed as the Basilica's "Royal Confrater," highlighting the historical link between the Basilica and the pre-Reformation English monarchy, when Anglo-Saxon kings contributed to the maintenance of the tomb of Saint Paul. Indeed, the symbol of the English chivalric Order of the Garter is still included in the Baslica's Coat of Arms.

Reciprocally, Pope Leo will become "Papal Confrater" of Saint George's Chapel, Windsor, which presumably he may visit if ever the Pope makes an official visit to the United Kingdom. His predecessor Pope Benedict XVI visited the UK in 2010, when he beatified John Cardinal Newman, whose subsequent canonization in Rome in 2019 was attended by Charles, then the Prince of Wales. (Pope Leo plans to proclaim Saint John Newman a Doctor of the Church on November 1.)

Despite the external resemblances - the Anglican Churches have a hierarchical, bishop-centered structure and a ritual form which preserves much of medieval English liturgical practice - the Catholic Church and Anglican Churches are divided by very serious questions about the validity of Anglican orders (thanks to changes made under Edward VI) and, more recently, the Anglican break with Catholic and orthodox sacramental understanding by ordaining women priests and bishops. Such serious differences remain as long-term obstacles to any kind of complete corporate reunion, but they are no longer overwhelming obstacles to dialogue and common prayer and witness, which represent an important common ecclesial response to the increasing crises of our time.

Photo: Pope Leo XIV with King Charles III and Queen Camilla at the Vatican on Thursday.

Credit...

Chris Jackson/Chris Jackson Collection, via Getty Images

Credit..Chris Jackson/Chris Jackson Collection, via Getty Images