First Sunday

An Episcopalian friend of mine once told me that having a set Lectionary (instead of being free to choose the readings yourself ) is a great blessing, because it forces you to let God's word set the theme, instead of artificially setting it yourself. I do agree with his general point; but I must admit that, had I been free to choose a scripture reading for my first Sunday as your new pastor, I doubt I could have chosen any better than today's 2nd reading (Hebrews 11:1-2, 8-19), interpreting the ancient story of Abraham, whom the liturgy so fittingly calls "our father in faith."

According the actual account in Genesis 12, Abraham - at the astonishingly young age of 75 - was commanded by God to move from his ancestral home to some vague new land that God promised to show him. His journey took Abraham from his family home in Haran (in modern Turkey) to the land of Canaan, stopping at Schechem, then journeying east past Bethel, then south through the Negev desert, even sojourning briefly in Egypt.

Now, admittedly, my move a couple of weeks ago was nowhere near so dramatic. I just got on a plane at Newark Airport, and two hours later landed in Knoxville. I did, however, have 41 boxes of books and other possessions which were shipped ahead of me and arrived after me. That may or may not seem like a lot, depending on your standard of comparison. I know lots of folks who've moved with many more things. And Abraham, so Genesis says, took his wife, his brother's son Lot, all the possessions that they had accumulated, and the persons they had acquired in Haran.

The author of the Letter to the Hebrews appropriately wants to emphasize Abraham's faith. So he does not refer at all to all the people and possessions that Abraham brought along with him. Abraham's faith really was the most important thing he brought with him, but all those other people and things must have mattered to him too.

Jesus famously encouraged his disicples to travel light (see, for example, Luke 19:1-9). Detachment from people and possessions is important - at times even necessary. Still, as Aristotle said, a life without friendships would be hard to bear; and, as we all appreciate, the attractiveness of things is plenty powerful too. Nor is that altogether bad. After all, without books, for example, I would not be the person that I am. I really just cannot imagine myself living without constantly reading and learning. As for all those other modern gadgets that have beocme so important of our wired - and wireless - world, we would all probably be better off without some of that stuff. Certainly, multi-tasking is a highly over-rated alternative to actually paying attention to something - or someone. Still, without at least some of those things, modern life would undoubtedly be poorer relationally, because it is increasingly those things that enable us to remain connected with one another. And that is no small matter! In his own unique time and place, Abraham also understood that living productively in this world and maintaining fulfilling human relationshps will almost always require at least some things.

Even so, much more important than any possession was the confident faith that freed Abraham to move trustingly in response to God's command, and to make the ultimately best use of all his possessions in the new land God was bringing him to. So it must be for me, as I move from one place to another, from one parish community to another. So it must ultimately be for all of us as we are being challenged all the time, day by day and year by year, to respond to the new opportunities God keeps giving us to follow him and so become the people we are meant to be - the people we together hope to become forever in his kingdom.

Homily at Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, August 7-8, 2010.

The 14th Amendment Under Fire

When I was first taught the Constitution in elementary school, we learned to remember the 3 "Reconstruction Amendments" this way: the 13th Amendment freed the slaves; the 14th made them citizens; and the 15th guaranteed their right to vote. At an age-appropriate level of simplification, that both enabled us to remember them and satisfactorily focused on the original intent of those amendments, which were also the first constitutional amendments to include the since then standard clause empowering Congress to enforce the amendment by appropriate legislation.

Since its ratification in 1868, the 14th Amendment has been used by our imperial judiciary to do all sorts of mischief not necessarily intended by its authors. Thus, corporations have been deemed as "persons" entitled to the rights thereof. And much (but, however illogically, not all) of the Bill of Rights has been "selectively incorporated" to bind states as well. Thus, despite the obvious fact that the 1st Amendment was intended to prevent the federal government from establishing a national religion, leaving the states free to maintain established churches if they wished to do so, the 14th Amendment has been used to distort the 1st Amendment into a force for imposing a radical secularist ideology not just on the federal government but also on the states.

Be that as it may, it remains clear that, whatever else it may mean or be made to mean, the 14th Amendment is about guaranteeing citizenship and its rights and benefits. In order to guarantee those rights and benefits to ex-slaves in the former Confederate States, the Amendment undid the infamous Dred Scott Decision - Dred Scot v. Sanford (1857), in some respects, the Roe v. Wade of the 19th century - and attached citizenship automatically to fact of being born in the United States.

To the best of my knowledge, that has been one of the fundamental, taken-for-granted, givens of American society ever since. Now, all of sudden, in the new nativist, anti-immigrant climate that certain extremist elements have been creating in this country, even the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is coming under attack.

Amending the Constitution is a very difficult task - as it was meant to be and as it should be. That is why there have been so relatively few amendments in the last 221 years. To repeal the 14th Amendment or any part of it would require a considerable consensus in society - certainly not likely in this instance. That being the case, one wonders why this has even been brought up at all.

It has been obvious for some time that the demographic evolution of American society and the electorate will sooner or later likely marginalize an anti-immigrant political party or any political party foolish enough to put all its electoral eggs in the nativist basket. Is this latest initiative perhaps a recognition of this fact and a last-ditch, albeit quixotic, effort to reverse the inevitable evolution of the electorate?

Quixotic it may be, but it is no less toxic to our political culture and to the fundamental values of American history and society. Whatever else America has been about, it has always been about being (as President Ronald Reagan rightly reminded us) a "city on a hill," whose light beckons to people from all over the world.

"Faithful to the Charism of Father Hecker"

Twenty-eight years ago tomorrow, on August 7, 1982, my seven classmates and I completed our year's novitiate and solemnly committed ourselves for one year to membership and mission in the Paulist Fathers, promising to live an evangelical life in accordance with the constitution and in fraternal support of our fellow Paulists. (Three and a half years later, on January 25, 1986, four of us renewed that promise for life).

Twenty-eight years later, I am still here - still a Paulist, eventually a priest, and now a pastor. When I consider all that has happened in the interim, I wonder whether it might have been appropriate for someone to have recited to us the familiar (to my generation) words from the old wedding ritual: That future, with its hopes and disappointments, its successes and its failures, its pleasures and its pains, its joys and its sorrows, is hiden from your eyes.

No less than a marriage, joining a religious community and committing oneself to its life and mission, may be like a leap into the dark -however joyfully the decision is made and however confidently one makes it. In an age in which lifelong commitments (formerly the social norm) appear increasingly to be exceptions, the leap may seem even more precarious.

Like so many before and since, Isaac Hecker had his difficulties in religious life. His commitment to it, however, no less than his commitment to the Church itself, never waivered.

Having been received into the Church in August 1844, Hecker's immediate task was to discern the appropriate vocation for himself within the Church. Already in 1943, he had apparently embraced a celibate life. In 1845, at New York's Redemptorist Church of the Most Holy Redeemer, he met two other new Catholics, former Episcopalians James McMaster and Clarence Walworth, who were planning to go to Europe to join the Redemptist Order. (Walworth's troubled family is the subject of a new book by Geoffrey O'Brien, recently reviewed in The New York Times and The New York Review of Books).

Having decided to join them, Hecker took an overnight train to Baltimore, where he confronted the Redemptorist Father Provincial after his morning Mass and requested admission. As the story goes, the Provincial gave him an on-the-spot Latin quiz, which Hecker passed, and immediately accepted him for the novitiate. Hecker headed back by train to New York, packed his bag, and was on the ship that night, bound eventually for the Redemptorist novitiate in Belgium. Filled with joy and confidence in his decision and the new life he had embraced, Hecker could hardly have foreseen the difficulties that lay ahead in his formation - and after. And how blessed I have been (and the Church has been) by Hecker's lifelong perseverance!

One week ago, attentive to the Holy Spirit and faithful to the example of Saint Paul and the charism of Father Hecker, our one Paulist novice made his profession of First Temporary Promises. Later this month, five earnest new candidates will follow in his footsteps and begin their novitiate year. May God continue to bless the Paulists and the entire Church with men willing to leap into the dark and commit their lives to ministry as priests in the Church!

The Patron of Parish Priests

From June 2009 through June 2010, the Church observed a special "Year for Pirests," intended to deepen priests' commitment for the sake of a more forceful and effective witness to the Gospel in today's world. The year began in Rome with the Pope venerating the relic of the heart of St. John Vianney, the patron saint of parish priests, who died 151 years ago tomorrow.

That same year, Charles Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities, a novel aobut the French Revoltuon, which begins with the famous phrase, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." Into that turbulent "worst of times," John Vianney was born just three years before the Revolution - a movement inspired by a hatred for the Church, the likes of which Europe had not seen since the worst of the Roman Emperors. Churches were desecrated and destroyed; and bishops, priests, and religious were massacred. Young John Vianney received his First Communion in secret, since public celebration of Mass by priests loyal to the Church was illegal.

After the Emperor Napoleon had restored some semblance of peace between Church and State, 20-year old John Vianney went to school to study for the priesthood. He failed the seminary admission test, but somehow managed on his second try. Even then, he was such a poor student that his continuance was in question. The Vicar General of the diocese finally asked the seminary rector, "Is Monsieur Vianney good?" The rector replied, "He is a model of goodness." To that, the Vicar General then replied: "Let him be ordained. The grace of God will do the rest." Commenting later on John Vianney's difficulties as a student, Isaac Hecker believed he recongized "the supernatural action of the Holy Spirit at work" in John Vianney's difficulties.

The damage done by the revolutionary "worst of times" was eminently evident in the little village of Ars (population 230), to which Fr. Vianney was sent as pastor in 1817. His bishop warned him, "There is little love of God in that parish." Eventually, however, in Ars, "the worst of times" became "the best of times" - thanks to John Vianney's complete identification with his priestly vocation. Always aware of his own inadequacies, but obedient to the Church that had called him to be a pastor and devoted to the people committed to his care, he sought to harmonize his own life with the holiness he was called to embody as a priest, instructing his parishioners by the personal witness of his life. "There are no two ways of serving God," he explained. "There is only one: serve him as he desires to be served."

Those who watched him celebrate Mass said "it was not possible to find a finer example of worship." John Vianney was said to have "gazed upon the Host with immense love." He believed the fervor of a priest depended on the Mass. "My God," he famously said, "how we ought to pity a priest who celebrates as if he were engaged in something routine." By his example, he helped his parishioners to pray. "One need not say much to pray well," he told them. "We know that Jesus is there in the tabernacle: let us open our hearts to him, let us rejoice in his sacred presence. that is the best prayer."

St. John Vianney is perhaps most famous for his ministry in the confessional. One legacy of "the worst of times" upheaval produced by the Rvolution was widespread indifference to the sacrament of forgiveness. Eventually, however, penitents would be coming to him from all over France, finally making it one of "the best of times" for the great sacrament of God's mercy.

At Work

Earlier this morning, we (that is, the Knoxville Paulists) stood on the porch of our house and waved goodbye to my predecessor as pastor of Immaculate Conception Church, as he headed north with all his worldly goods to assume the ministry of Paulist Director of the Newman Center in Columbus, Ohio. A few minutes later, with a lot less fanfare, I packed up some things and got into the car that as of today has become mine and drove the short distance to the church that I am now pastor of. Now I am sitting in my office, surrounded by the chaos of boxes and possessions that are waiting to be organized, wondering just what I should be doing first.

The one thing I know I will be doing today for certain is to celebrate the daily Mass in the church at 12:10. According to Canon Law, "priests are earnestly invited to offer the euchristic sacrifice daily" (Canon 276.2). While obviously not a strict obligation, this recommendation reflects the accumulated wisdom of recent centuries, when the celebration of daily Mass became an increasingly important part of popular as well as priestly piety. (One of the already evident consequences of the shortage of priests is the severely diminished access to daily Mass in many places, not to mention the even more tragic situation of diminished access to Sunday Mass in many places).

Generally speaking (with obvious exceptions), daily (or almost daily) Mass has been more or less the rule for me in my two previous assignments as a priest (Toronto and New York). Although there is only one scheduled daily Mass Monday-Saturday here, various other obligations will likely make daily (or almost daily) Mass more the rule than the exception here too. And that seems good. Apart from all the theological and spiritual considerations that have animated the modern traditon of daily Mass, I think it works well, at least for me, as a sort of stabilizing spiritual anchor in one's regular routine, with all its confusions and distractions. And at no time is that more obvious, perhaps, than when one is in transition, as I am! So I look forward to centering these confusing, awkward, and demanding transitional days around the daily celebration of the Mass with the gathered community of my parishioners in our beautiful parish church.