New Year's Eve

The Times Square New Year's Eve "Ball" (photo) is ready for its annual descent later tonight. And millions of us are getting ready to watch it, in person at Times Square or, more likely, on TV, each of us uniting our individual histories and hopes with millions of others, all associating ourselves with this reliable ritual. What is it about the annual turn of the calendar that brings out all this intense emotion and activity at midnight tonight?

I am reminded of the finale of season 6 of Downton Abbey, set appropriately on New Year's Eve, and this final dialogue between Violet, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, and Isobel Crawley;

Violet: "It makes me smile! The way every year we drink to the future, whatever it may bring."

Isobel: "What else can we drink to? We're going forwards into the future, not back into the past!"

Violet: "If only we had the choice!"

Presumably, the Dowager Countess was intended to represent a nostalgic affection for a more stable past in contrast to a plainly uncertain future. Fair enough, although the 30 or so years of the early 20th century that the series supposedly had covered clearly contradicted any notion of a better, more stable past as a time to choose to go back to, were that option ever actually available. For better or for worse, as Isobel well understood, we are propelled forward into the future, whether we like it or not. So we might as well toast the future, "whatever it may bring."

That said, New Year's Eve does make me nostalgic for New Year's Eves past and the worlds we have lost - and, more to the point, the people, once part of my life, who have been lost, starting, of course, with my own family. I think back to years of joyful New Year's Eves spent, in a kind of timeless, suspended childhood innocence, with a multitude of aunts, uncles, and cousins, then seemingly important players in my small world, now long gone, that world itself now just a shadow.

I now have the privilege of spending New Year's Eve with friends from my Church family. Time passing by loses much of its allure with advancing age. But friendship abides, and assumes even greater significance as it fills up what is increasingly lacking in life's obviously waning years.

Time has always been very precious – precisely, I suppose, because we have only such a limited supply of it, a reality of which New Year's Eve so forcefully reminds us. But, by becoming part of our limited time in the Incarnation of the Son  of God which we celebrate with such splendor at this season, God has turned our limited time on earth into a time of unlimited opportunity. Against the lamentable background of cherished memories of people passed away, lives lost, relationships ruptured, and unfulfilled expectations, the mystery of the Incarnation invites us to look ahead to a new year with gratitude for God's gifts and to go forward into an uncertain and possibly frightening future, not without anxiety, but buoyed nonetheless by the transcendent hope that counts as one of God’s greatest Christmas gifts to us.

A Really Rough Year

Whatever else may be said or sayable about our troubled time, 2025 has certainly been a really rough year. To paraphrase a famous 1992 speech by Queen Elizabeth II, 2025 "is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure." 

That said, for me personally, 2025 has nonetheless had some very happy high points - in particular, the celebration of my 30th ordination anniversary in the affirming and fulfilling setting of family, friends, and religious community. This year also saw the surprising, but so very satisfying election of an American Augustinian as Pope Leo XIV. His rootedness in religious community (one so dear to me from my own upbringing and early education), his missionary experience in Peru, and his inspired choice of name all invite enthusiasm and hope for the Church and evoke echoes of Servant of God Isaac Hecker's hope in "the dawning light of an approaching, brighter, more glorious future for God's Holy Church."

And, at my age, any year lived well without serious illness is a good year in at least that limited personal sense! For all of that I am grateful.

But, beyond such admittedly positive personal perspectives, 2025 has still been a really rough year for the world in general, a grim year for far too many people in particular. I think of people increasingly alienated from one another by political and cultural differences in our troubled and conflicted society, some struggling to buy groceries or pay a medical bill or, even worse, worried about being targeted for violent harassment and the dangers of deportation. It has been a year of unprecedentedly arrogant political overreach and of corresponding cowardice on the part of cultural elites. Abroad, it has been a year of continued warfare and war's related civilian suffering. And that most ancient and persistent of the world's hatreds - antisemitism - has dramatically increased on both the political left and the political right.

For much of this year, a feeling of helpless passivity has been the main response to much of this. Only as the year limped to its end - in the wake, for example, of the November off-year-elections - has there been any perceptible change of mood. Even so, much irreversible damage. has been done. I think, for example, of the catastrophic consequences of the loss of USAID, which expended less than 1% of the U.S. Budget, but which was a world class life saver. I think too of all the children who may get measles - or worse - thanks to changes in vaccine policies.

There are several lenses through which one can consider the calamities of 2025. One which has acquired considerable popularity in the discourse, thanks to its successful use as an issue in the off-year elections, is affordability. In a general sense, that refers to the obvious fact that flourishing human and social life require people to earn enough to live adequately - to enjoy reasonable safety and security, to have suitable jobs that preferably provide benefits and some mobility, to be able to educate their children to live as well or better, etc. Meanwhile, the interests of the ruling oligarchy have diverged farther and farther from those of the mass of the population, with the latter increasingly treated as an unwelcome and increasingly redundant burden interfering with the oligarchy's profits. (The rise of AI may now realize the oligarchic ideal of eliminating any need to pay human workers! As Karl Marx observed back in 1856, "The new-fangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want.")

Another complementary lens through which to interpret our present distress is the retreat from pluralistic, constitutional order and rule of law into authoritarianism. About this, we have a lonh legacy of reflection from classical philosophy, which we know was somewhat preoccupied with the problem of the decline of democracy into despotism. In Book VIII of the Republic, Plato famously described the deterioration of his ideal city into the corrupt forms of oligarchy and democracy. The latter leads to despotism when the people support a demagogue. For anyone who ever doubted the abiding relevance of ancient political philosophy, both Plato and Aristotle had much to say that remains relevant to our contemporary democratic decline. So, of course, do more modern thinkers, like Alexis de Tocqueville who lived through French democratic decline into despotism under Napoleon III.

Looking beyond our borders, the lens of international relations offers a similarly depressing take on recent events. It is increasingly evident that the relatively stable post-World War II international order, that was largely guaranteed by a combination of overwhelming American power and moderately benign American interests is quickly coming to an end, as the world reverts to a previously common international order of competing spheres of interest. Thus, for  example, before its post-war internationalism, the U.S. seemed largely animated by the Monroe Doctrine, according to which whatever other empires did in their respective spheres of interest generally was not seen as a threat to American interests or values as long as other empires recognized the western hemisphere as the American empire's exclusive sphere of interest. Meanwhile, the damage done to the network of alliances that has managed the world these past 80 years has been perhaps irrevocable. All the while, much of the world (including Europe) is accordingly reverting to what was in the past the normal condition of war or threat of war.

Meanwhile back at home, the fragile network laboriously built up over generations of a pluralistic, increasingly open society has been challenged and has demonstrably frayed, as the always present nativist xenophobic streak in American culture has loudly and dangerously reasserted itself. For many immigrants and asylum seekers, the result has been direct personal tragedy. For many groups, it has been a collective trauma. For the nation as a whole, irreparable damage has been done to the institutions and relationships that have held our society together and have contributed so much to its peace and prosperity.

So, whatever else may be said, 2025 has been a very grim year, a really rough year for our country and our world.

Hamnet (The Movie)

 

In times past, I often ended the year reviewing the movies I had seen and rating them. I go to the movies so much less now that reviewing and rating no longer has much point. My final film of the year does, however, inspire some comment.

Hamnet is a historically-based drama, based on a novel about William Shakespreare's. marriage, the death of his son Hamnet, and the consequent composition of the play Hamlet. Shakespeare's family were real, although his actual wife was Anne, while in the movie she is named Agnes.

The film is somewhat slow-going at the start. Shakespeare, the son of a glove-maker, is Latin tutor for some local boys and falls in love with a local girl named Agnes, who is reputed to be the daughter of a forest witch. (She does spend a lot of time in the forest, with her hawk, and knows a lot about herbs. There is the suggestion that Agnes may practice some form of natural religion or folk practices representing surviving pagan ideas and traditions within  Christian Europe. I have no idea whether anything like this was the case with Shakespeare's actual wife.) Over the objections of their families, the two marry and have a daughter, followed by twins, a son and a daughter. 

Shakespeare is frustrated and moves to London, where, of course, he eventually becomes involved in the theater. In Stratford, the twins contract plague. The daughter survives, but the son, Hamnet, who had aspired to join his father's theater company, dies. His parents plunge into grief, but Shakespeare quickly returns to work in London, leaving Agnes angry, their relationship somewhat strained. She and her brother travel to London's Globe Theater to attend the performance of Hamlet, the dramatic product of its author's fatherly grief. The famous revenge-tragedy is presented in the film as a play about family mourning and loss and the challenge (and ultimate impossibility) of setting things right again. 

As the play (in which the author himself appears as the ghost of Hamlet's father) unfolds and reaches its tragic ending, Agnes identifies her son with the actor playing the dying Hamlet. She hauntingly extends her hands to reach out to the actor, a gesture the audience then joins in with her, fully making the play a common collective tribute to her lost son.

The movie may have seemed somewhat slow-going at the start, but it picks up in intensity, and its ending is genuinely beautiful.

Merry Christmas

 

Last week, some of us gathered in front of the TV to watch the 1951 Alastair Sim version of Charles Dickens’ classic, A Christmas Carol, reexperiencing Scrooge’s overnight conversion to Christmas. In the Gospel, as in Dickens, while a lot happens during the night, it is in the morning when it all comes together and begins to make a difference.

Now one might respond that, of course, Christmas has been going on all around us for several weeks now – so much so that some people perhaps may be getting tired of it already! What is there that is new to say after weeks of Christmas carols and shopping and parties? And, anyway, what is there that is so new to say some 2000+ years after the event that we call “the First Christmas”?

Well, let’s start by imagining that it had never happened! Well, for one thing, we wouldn’t be here this morning! And this beautiful church, that has graced this urban center now for 140 years, would never have been built! And, whatever year this would be, it wouldn’t be 2025 – Anno Domini 2025, the year of the Lord 2025. What happened that First Christmas was so fundamentally important that, even now, we still calculate our calendar and date our years from it.  But more important than numbers and dates, if Christmas had never happened, the whole history of the past 20 centuries would have been very, very different. And, even more important than that, we ourselves would be very different. As St. Augustine (354-430) so succinctly expressed it: “If [God’s] Word had not become flesh and had not dwelt among us, we would have had to believe that there was no connection between God and humanity and we would have been in despair.”

To which, some scowl might reply that, for all our holiday cheer, there is a lot less joy in the world than our carols claim. It has been a really rough year for a lot of people - people increasingly alienated from one another in our troubled and conflicted society, some struggling to buy groceries or pay a medical bill or, even worse, worried about being targeted for violent harassment and the dangers of deportation. It is not for nothing that we pray at Mass that we may be safe from all distress.

Our distress is real enough, as is our anxiety about it, but so must be our faith in the rest of our prayer - as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

As St. Paul put it in his letter to Titus, from which we just heard, the kindness and generous love of God our savior appeared, … so that we might be justified by his grace and become heirs in hope of eternal life. not because of any righteous deeds we had done but because of his mercy.

And what better models for this than the shepherds, whose their openness to the angel’s surprising message and their enthusiastic response, took them to Bethlehem!

In standard Nativity scenes, the shepherds seemingly stick around forever. They’re still kneeling there when the Magi arrive. In fact, they stayed just long enough to find Mary and Joseph and Jesus. And then the shepherds went back to work and to their ordinary lives. But nothing for them would ever be ordinary again. They returned glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen. However socially insignificant they may have been, however ordinary the lives they returned to, the kingdom of God was being born among them.

And, however ordinary we and our daily concerns may seem today, the kingdom of God is also being born among us – if only, like the shepherds, we hasten to find it in Mary’s Son, whose coming into the world represents a decisive transformation of our world.

The same Son of God who revealed himself to the shepherds in the Son of Mary continues to reveal himself to us in his Church this Christmas morning. Like the shepherds, we hasten with wonder to find him and to be found in turn. And, as his Church, we continue doing what the shepherds did, making known the message about this child in whom the kindness and generous love, the mercy and forgiveness, of God our savior have appeared and forever more continue to appear.

Among us this Christmas morning, no less than among those shepherds so long ago, the kingdom of God is being born, breaking into our otherwise ordinary, self-enclosed world and offering it the precious possibility of hope, which happens to be the special theme of the Jubilee year that is coming to an end.

So, when the last carol has been sung and we disperse from here to our happy homes and holiday meals (or perhaps, as many must, to a somewhat sad or lonely home, or to a modest, maybe meager meal), may that same precious and powerful hope move us and fill us and change us, as surely as it did those long ago shepherds – and so transform our frustration into fulfillment, our sadness into joy, our hatred into love, our loneliness into community, our rivals and competitors into brothers and sisters, and our inevitable death into eternal life. 

Merry Christmas!

Homily for Christmas Morning, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, December 25, 2025.

Confession?

 

Back in what some see as the Golden Age of U.S. Catholicism - the 20 years between the end of World War Ii and the end of Vatican II - frequent confession was increasingly the norm for American Catholics as ever greater numbers responded to exhortations to more frequent Communion and took advantage of the relaxed fasting rules to receive Communion more and more often. In elementary school during that period, we were routinely marched over to church - all 1000+ of us - on the first Thursday of every month, so that the parish priests could dutifully hear all of our confessions. Years later, when I was a pastor myself and was on the receiving end of school confessions, I remember listening to repeated defenses of the practice on the grounds that children needed to get into the habit. Personally I was always somewhat skeptical. Whatever the merits of frequent confession the habit argument seemed self-evidently weak, since it was precisely my generation that had been compelled to acquire the habit and that then had so spectacularly broken that same habit!

There are encouraging signs of religious revival in the U.S. and even in Europe, and certainly some people are going to confession. The sacrament has most certainly not died out, as some may have predicted not so long ago that it would. But the overall pattern of apparent decline may have been set decades ago. The story of the golden age of frequent confession and of its apparently sudden and unexpected collapse is ably told in James M. O'Toole, For I have Sinned: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America (Harvard U. Pr., 2025).

For anyone (like myself) who is old enough to remember the unique contours of pre-1965 American Catholic life, O'Toole's book is a true trip down memory lane. He begins with a series of historical vignettes - Saint Louis, MO, 1807, New York City, 1897, Milwaukee, 1944, New Orleans, 1951 - that he calls "Four snapshots of American Catholics going to confession," experiences "replicated across the landscape and across the decades." We hear some historic anecdotes about traveling missionaries from the early days of American Catholicism, how they heard confessions and promoted the observance of the sacrament on the frontier. Mainly, we get to remember what it was like - in what is still living memory - when parish priests heard confessions for hours on Saturday afternoons and eves of holy days, and people came in great numbers, weekly, monthly, and on special occasions like parish missions.

O'Toole gives us the experience from both sides of the confessional box. (The box itself gets a lot of attention - in loco publico et patenti in ecclesia.) We recall what the experience was like. - for men, for women, for children, and for different ethnic and linguistic groups. We rehearse the procedures one was expected to follow, from examining one's conscience to being sorry for one's sins, to actually confessing them, to perhaps being questioned or given advice, to saying the Act of Contrition, to finally saying one's penance. But he also gives us the confessor's perspective, how priests were prepared in the seminary for the major time commitment of hearing confessions and how priests themselves actually experienced celebrating the sacrament that was then so central to the rhythm of the week. (One curious omission is the special legislation and expectations concerning the confessions of priests and religious. I can recall how priests and religious were apparently expected to confess weekly and how religious women had to present themselves to their "extraordinary confessor" four times per year, usually at the Ember Days.)

For those interested in the intersection of confession with the law - once again an issue of some concern in certain jurisdictions - O'Toole recounts the famous 1813 case which laid the foundation for the legal protection of the seal of confession in New York, reaffirmed in 1817, and finally written into law in 1828.

How did this time-honored, so very widely practiced sacrament suddenly go into what has seemed like serious decline? O'Toole devotes an entire chapter to the rise of psychology - to early Catholic opposition, especially to Freudianism (e.g., famously Fulton Sheen), and then the rather thoroughgoing embrace of therapeutic culture not just by secular American society but by the Church itself (for example, in vocational recruitment for priests and religious). "Just as some early Catholic critics had feared, a clear sense of sin might be challenged or even abandoned, once psychology had been let through the mental door." And more was changing in Catholics' mental world than the embrace of psychology and psychotherapy, as Catholics in increasing numbers "were enjoying a sense of security, belonging, and self-confidence unknown to their parents and grandparents."

Unsurprisingly, "Collapse" gets a full chapter all its own, starting with an accumulation of dissatisfactions. "The very success of the clergy at urging frequent confession had generated problems of its own, swelling the numbers but creating a new set of expectations. ... Compounding all these reactions was a growing realization that much of what was confessed was trivial." Then, came Vatican II, which, among other things, "demonstrated that church leaders did not always agree with one another." Finally, the crisis over contraception became "a matter of who got to decide what was sinful and how church teaching would be presented and received."

The post-conciliar reform of the rites for celebrating the sacrament seems to get less attention than one might have expected. Rite Two never really caught on in popularity with laypeople, and Rite Three was never intended to be the norm, which effectively has left us with a rite little different from what had been the practice previously. O'Toole mentions but does not much develop the intriguing idea that we might think of the Church as being again where it was when the ancient canonical Penance died out and it took time to develop something new that was suited to a new time and place.

The author seems to have little expectation that efforts to return to more widespread use of confession have much chance to succeed; "lost worlds do not usually come back, no matter how idealized in memory." That said, he seems to recognize that something of value really has been lost. "Despite its many flaws, there was a solidarity in that world, a community formed through participation and collective activity that promoted a reassuring sense of belonging. It connected disparate individuals and families with one another and, they hoped, with the divine. The social distinctions that mattered elsewhere faded."

And, ultimately, there is the problem of our seemingly diminished sense of sin. "At risk of loss, too, is a larger framework for thinking about how we behave with one another, both personally and collectively. How are we to live out our ideals, and how come to terms with those times when we don't."