St. Patrick's Day

St. Patrick's Day was unavoidable in New York. In High School, I had to march in the parade. In the 1990s, when I was working for the Archdiocese, I, of course, had the day off. For the past 10 years, as a priest in New York, I was required by the rubrics of the liturgy to celebrate the local patronal feast. Here, however, although my church has a beautiful window dedicated to St. Patrick, it is a day like any other.

Great misisonary evangelizer that he was, St. Patrick undoubtedly deserves all the honor he receives, however far afield some of that honor may stray from what he was actaully all about. The son of a deacon and grandson of a priest, Patrick was born into a well-to-do family of landed gentry in the Roman province of Britain. At 16, however, his comfortable life suddenly ceased when he was captured and enslaved by Irish raiders. During 6 years as a slave herdsman in Ireland, Patrick’s conventional Christianity was transformed into an ardent, fervent faith. After a successful escape and return to Britain, he felt a call to convert the pagan Irish to Christianity. Ordained a bishop, he returned to Ireland and remained there until his death on this day in 461.

Unlike Patrick’s home island of Britain, Ireland had never been part of the Roman Empire. It was beyond the borders of what then constituted civilization. St. Patrick stands out as one of the first in Western Christian history to feel the imperative to evangelize beyond the borders of the Empire, to take literally the the Gospel’s mandate to teach all nations. In his Confession, Patrick described his sense of mission. “I want to spend myself in that country, even in death, if the Lord should grant me this favor. I am deply in his debt, for he gave me the great grace that through me many peoples should be reborn in God, and then made perfect by confirmation and everywhere among them clergy ordained for a people so recently coming to believe, one people gathered by the Lord from the ends of the earth. ... It is among that people that I want to wait for the promise made by him, who assuredly never tells a lie. ... This is our faith: believers are to come from the whole world.”

The de facto leading spokesman for the Church in contemporary Ireland is Diarmuid Martin, Archbishop of Dublin. Last month, Archbishop Martin spoke at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he offered a telling analysis of the current state of (and the challenges facing) the Church in Ireland. That analysis was amplified further a few days ago in another talk he gave, this one on the relationship between Church and State in Ireland. Inevitably, much of his analysis speaks to a specifically Irish situation (a one-time "bastion of traditonal Catholicism" now quite changed from "the conformist Ireland of the Archbishop McQuaid era"). The present of every local Church is conditioned by its past, and the future of every local Church is correspondingly conditioned by how it intereacts with that historical legacy. That said, Archbishop Martin's analysis also addresses the wider concerns of the Church in contemporary, post-modern, secularised societies.

The bottom-line difficulty facing the Church not just in Ireland but throughout the secularised West (including even the United States) is reflected in (and in turn exacerbated by) the vocation crisis and its ripple effects. "The number of priests are falling. There is more work to be done by preists who are getting older. The task of simply responding to the deay-to-day demands of ministry leaves many priests with little time to take on new tasks and address radically new ways of life and ministry."

At the very time - the last third of the 20th century - when Western society took its giant leap into secularism, the Catholic Church also underwent a period of rapid and intense internal change. As Martin notes, "the [Second Vatican] Council was ineviatably received in terms of the culture of the day which at times may have coloured the interpretation of what the Counciul intended." Certainly in the U.S., disputes over the correct intepretation of the Council's intent have contributed to contrasting visions of what the Church is all about and a demoralyzing polarization that has further sapped the Church's evangelizing energy.

At Cambridge, Martin suggested that all was not well in "the good old days" - resulting in "faulty foundations" for "structural change." In his March lecture, he makes the broader observation that, while Church renewal requires structural renewal, such "a renewal of structures alone would be sterile." Renewal, Martin argues, "can only be shaped from the perspective of Chrsitian life" and it is "the nature of the Church" which must dictate the "strucutres of reform of the Church." My own sense is that so much debate about structures in the Church suffers from an excessive reliance on political categories of analysis and lacks precisely the all-important focus on the essential nature of the Church, which, whatever its relation with its surrounding culture, cannot allow itself to be assimilated to it.

Martin himself makes this point quite clearly, emphaiszing it by repeating it in both talks: "the farther the Church goes in adapting to the culture of the times, the greater the danger is that it will no longer be able to confront the culture of the time. It will only be able to speak the language of the culture of the day and not the radical newness of the message of the Gospel which transcends all cultures. There this happens, then the life of the Church becomes a sort of civil religion, politically correct, but without the cutting edge of the Gospel."

In light of the concerns expressed in recent studies highighting the Church in America's ambibuous perfomance both in retention of its members and in the recruitment of new members, do we in the U.S. need to take more to heart this challenge from one of the heirs of St. Patrick?

Ash Wednesday

Remember, you are dust and to dust you will return.

What is it about having dirt smudged on your face and being told that you're going to die that makes this day such an irresistible draw for so many people? Could it be - could it just be - because it is true? In this "information age," we are assailed on all sides by all sorts of "information," whether we need it or not and whether it is true or not. Could it be - could it just be - that in this age of "spin" and lies upon lies, we are finally being told something that is true?

To be sure, dying has never been among the more popular topics of conversation - although that may be beginning to change now that my generation of so-called "baby boomers" has started to hit 60 and look forward to Medicare. As I look ahead to turning 63 in two weeks, I am acutely aware that I'm not anymore what I once was - and never will be again!

Death, of course, is that divine command that says "Stop" - the one divine command that we absolutely cannot disobey, no matter how hard we try. I think it is really a great example of the Church's liturgical genius that it can take something so fundamentally ugly as death and ritualize it so well!

Clearly, Lent owes a lot of its unique and powerful appeal to the way it confronts us with the inescapable reality of of who we are in relation to God and challenges us to face up to that reality - something we sinners by and large generally don't care to do and try so hard to avoid doing. Lent is the Church's annual wake-up call to make us remember who we are and where we're going and how we hope to get there.

Ultimately, of course, Lent is not about death but about life - the new life in Christ that began for each of us at baptism. Lent is the Church's annual wake-up call to take seriously who we are in Christ and what this new life of his that began for each of us at baptism really is. It's a time to reflect once again on life's big picture, to renew ourselves at the heart of who we are, in the community of Jesus' disciples - converted, renewed, and reconciled in a new and better way of being human.

Homily for Ash Wednesday, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, March 9, 2011.

The House Built on Rock

Three years ago, at the start of his pastoral visit to the United States, Pope Benedict XVI asked: “Is it consistent to profess our beliefs in church on Sunday, and then during the week to promote business practices or medical procedures contrary to those beliefs? Is it consistent for practicing Catholics to ignore or exploit the poor and the marginalized, to promote sexual behavior contrary to Catholic moral teaching, or to adopt positions that contradict the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death? Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted. Only when their faith permeates every aspect of their lives do Christians become truly open to the transforming power of the Gospel.”

Jesus solemn warning at the conclusion of his Sermon on the Mount - “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my father in heaven” [Matthew 7:21] - was not addressed to people generically, but rather very specifically to those who believe in him – that is, to us. Surely, we have all heard that old cliché: If I were put on trial for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict? Well, guess what? On Judgment Day, Jesus warns, it will not be enough to have believed, to have said ‘Lord, Lord’, to have professed faith in Christ and considered oneself a disciple, without having also therefore lived in a way which warrants one’s being recognized as such – by him first of all! Even those entertaining superstars who drive out demons and do mighty deeds don’t get guaranteed a place in the kingdom without corresponding, recognizable action. Once again, we are being reminded that we really are what we do. That is: what we do, how we live, reveals who we are – and who we hope to be, the kind of person we will in fact be for all eternity, thanks to our actions in the here and now.

In this regard, I really like the image Jesus uses of the house – the house built on rock vs. the house built on sand. So often Jesus’ parables reflect their rural roots in the agrarian society in which they originated. Fair enough, but not all of us live on farms or in rural villages. But everybody everywhere needs and depends on adequate shelter – and so can relate to the universal image of a well-built house.

Jesus’ image, however, should also us that we do not build our house entirely on our own, all by ourselves. The faithful disciple may indeed be like the one who builds a great mansion on a foundation of solid rock. The rock, however, is not built by the builder. It is there for us to build upon, but it is not of our own making. It is, so to speak, a gift, to which we respond by building well upon it. We give thanks for that gift by what we build, by the life we live, all made possible in the first place by the firm foundation we have been given.

Often in recent years, riding the bus between New York City and Newark Airport, coming out of the Lincoln Tunnel, I have often found myself staring at a particular building built on top of an especially impressive outcrop of solid stone at the end of a Jersey City street. I think it’s a public library now, but it was obviously originally built as a private house. Looking at it is almost enough to make one want to sing a verse or two of John Rippon’s stirring 18th-century hymn that begins: How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord, is laid for your faith in his excellent word!

So, even before we worry about building, first and foremost we have to make sure we are building on a firm foundation – and not on any of the faulty structures that seem so tempting today. Jesus famously promised to build his Church on the solid rock of the revelation of who he is and what he is all about, rather than the shifting sands of popular alternatives.

This coming Wednesday, we will all come to church to be signed with blessed ashes – reminding us of our mortality, calling us to conversion and repentance, and identifying us publicly, for all the world to recognize, as his professed disciples. Jesus challenges those who would want to be recognized by him as his disciples to build ambitiously upon the firm foundation of his freely given grace. Rather than sink into the superficially seductive sand that so deceptively lures us every which way, let us build - with God’s gift of himself as our firm foundation – a beautiful building for all eternity, out of what we make of our lives in the here and now.

March 4, 1861

On this day in 1789, the US Constitution went into effect. It was apparently an inauspicious beginning. Not enough members of Congress had even made it to New York in time to constitute a quorum, and it would be almost two months before George Washington would finally be inaugurated as the first President. But the government did get going, and every four years after that - from 1793 through 1933 - the United States inauagurated a President on this date.

150 years ago today, it was Abraham Lincoln's turn to be inaugurated at what was perhaps the most precarious moment in American history, when the very existence of the United States was threatened as never quite before or since. (Tennessee was what was then called a "border state." It had not yet seceeded - something that would not happen finally until June).

Lincoln's 1st Inaugural Address is justly famous for his appeal - simultaneously reasoned and passionate - for the country to stay together. His emotionally powerful conclusion still resonates in a society still sadly all too deeply divided: We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Lincoln's speech contained more than memorable and inspiring rhetoric, however. It was a well articulated expression of a philosphy of democratic constitutional government. Lincoln had strong convictions about what a democratic polity entailed and did not hesitate to express them, even to the likely discomfort of the man who a few minutes later would administer the Presidential oath of office to him - Chief Justice of the United States and author of the infamous Dred Scot decision, Roger Taney. Confronted with the calamitous consequences of that particularly malevolent exercise of judicial imperialsm, Lincoln laid out his position - the position of democratic constitutionalism - with a lawyer's clarity.

I do not forget the position assumed by some that constitutional questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court, nor do I deny that such decisions must be binding in any case upon the parties to a suit as to the object of that suit, while they are also entitled to very high respect and consideration in all parallel cases by all other departments of the Government. ... At the same time, the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.

One could hardly have said it better.

Trains

Of all the many modes of transportation, I have always liked trains most of all. (Prior to my knee and back problems a couple of years ago, I invariably even preferred the New York City Subway to riding the bus!).

Forty years ago, an assignment in my undergraduate American Political Thought class was to write an American "Utopia." There are any number of things about the America I envisioned in that paper that I might not subscribe to today, but the privileged status of inter-city train travel that I included in my "Utopia" expressed an anti-automibile bias I still feel (even if I now have to drive a car every single day!).

Living in New York until last year, I almost always took Amtrak if I was going to Washingotn, Dc, or to Boston. Although I can hear the railraod from my bedroom at night, it's entirely freight traffic. Although there is now a welcome MegaBus connection between Knoxville and DC, there is no longer any passenger train service from Knoxville to anywhere. (There is a beautiful train station, walking distance from my church, which -oddly - is now slated to become a high school!)

All this is on my mind because of reading George Will's political column in the March 7 Newsweek. As for Will's take on trains, his title says it all: "High Speed to Insolvency: Why Liberals Love Trains." Now Will is undoubtedly one of the brighter bulbs in the conservative chandelier, and there have been many occasions over the decades when I have found much wisdom and insight in his analyses. Nor do I necessarily doubt Will's facts, however much I disagree with his pro-car ideology. He is probably correct on the costliness of rail transportation. Indeed, I am almost willing to stipulate that probably any other way of getting from place to place - bus, plane, or even auto - is probably more efficient and less expensive to society in the long run. But I still prefer trains!

Some of that may be purely personal and esthetic. Airline travel was once seen as luxurious, but not anymore. Trains are the one mode of travel (apart perhaps from ships, which are also largely irrelevant as alternatives) where one can really sit in comfort and also walk around, etc. Admittedly, however, that is a highly personal preference.

At its heart, however, Will's argument is about freedom - individual freedom. "To progressives," contends Will, "the best thing about railroads is that people riding them are not in automobiles, which are subversice of the deference on whihc progressivism depends. Automobiles go hither and yon, whever and wherever the friver desires, without timetables," Will continues. "Automobiles encourage people to think they - unsupervised, untutored, and unscripted - are masters of their fates. The automoibile encourages people in delusions of adequacy, which make them resistant to government by experts who know what chopices people should make."

That quasi-libertarian argument resonates deeply at the roots of Americna experience. As I have often said, in explaining American values to European friends, most of our ancestors came here to get away from overly controlling social structures, which is why Americans will often choose the excesses of liberty over the security and comfort of government intervention in their lives. I understand that - and can even agree with it up to a point.

But there is another dimension to human existence, which an uncritical preoccupation with liberty misses. What is so powerfully appealing about trains to me is how irreducibly (as I believe Tony Judt once remarked) public traveling by train is. It is a communal experience, which for me taps into the fundamentally social dimension of human nature - the very dimension which is so thoroughly under attack today.

Trains may not be efficient. They probably are more costly than we can as a country afford at present. But they represent something we cannot afford to forget about why we need a country and what it takes to flourish as full human beings - something we forget to our great peril.