St. Damien

Today the Church in the United States commemorates "the Apostle of the Lepers," Belgian-born Saint Damien de Veuster (1840–1889). Ordained a priest of the missionary Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary in 1864, he served his entire priesthood in Hawaii. A year after Damien's initial assignment to Hawaii, the Kingdom of Hawaii established a leper colony on the island of Molokai where Hawaiians who contracted “Hansen’s Disease” (then thought to be highly contagious) were to be quarantined. In 1873, Father Damien went to Molokai as the leper colony’s pastor. In a letter to his brother back in Belgium, Damien wrote (paraphrasing St. Paul) “I make myself a leper with the lepers to gain all to Jesus Christ.” Indeed, 20 years later, Damien himself contracted leprosy. He died in 1889 - nursed by, among others, German-born, Franciscan Sister Marianne Cope (herself just recently canonized by Pope Benedict XVI). Beatified in Brussels by Pope John Paul II in 1995, he was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009.

Damien achieved fame for his ministry in his own lifetime. The King of Hawaii honored him, and the attendant publicity produced international interest in and support for his mission. After his death, devotion to him spread among Catholics and admiration of him extended beyond religious boundary lines. He is one of four Catholic priests to be honored with a statue in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall.

Mahatma Gandhi is supposed to have said of Fr. Damien: “The political and journalistic world can boast of very few heroes who compare with Father Damien of Molokai. The Catholic Church, on the contrary, counts by the thousands those who after the example of Fr. Damien have devoted themselves to the victims of leprosy. It is worthwhile to look for the sources of such heroism.”  More recently, at the time of St. Damien's canonization, President Obama said, "In our own time, as millions around the world suffer from disease, especially the pandemic of HIV/AIDS, we should draw on the example of Father Damien’s resolve in answering the urgent call to heal and care for the sick."

Humanitarian heroism may spring from diverse motivations, and much good is undoubtedly done in the world by people whose inspiration is not explicitly religious.  But, as St. Damien’s words to his brother remind us, there can be no doubt what motivated him (and later religious missionaries in Molokai like Saint Marianne Cope) as well as countless other heroic practitioners of the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, known and unknown, past and present.

Ascension

Tomorrow is the 40^th day of Easter, the traditional date of the Ascension. It is a legal holiday in several traditionally Christian countries - among them Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. Not so, sadly, in the United States, although New York City at least celebrates the Ascension in its own suitably urban style by suspending its "Alternate Side of the Street Parking" rules for the day. In much of the United States, in fact, the feast is transferred to next Sunday, when to get much notice at all this year it will have to struggle mightily to compete for attention with that great secular holiday, Mothers Day!

Historically, the actual Ascension event marked the end of the short post-Easter period when the Risen Lord appeared several times to his disciples. With the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles and the other disciples on Pentecost, a new period of history has begun, the age of the Church, our time, in which the presence and action of the Risen Christ continue in the world through the life and mission of the Church. It thus points back to the Church's beginning, while at the same time highlighting the ongoing present life and misison of the Church in this world, and points forward to humanity's final destiny.

Before the conquest of Rome by the Kingdom of Italy in 1870, the Ascension was one of those special days when the Papal Blessing Urbi et Orbi was given. Traditonally, on the Ascension, it was given at the Basilica of St. John Lateran (although the stational church for the Ascension is St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican). Traditionally too the Easter Candle was solemnly extinguished after the Gospel reading on the Ascension (as it presumably still is in the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Liturgy). Somewhat diminished in our modern May of Mothers Day and graduations and other secular occasions, the Ascension still speaks an important message and deserves to be celebrated with all the splendor the Church can muster.

In the Ambrosian Liturgy's Preface for today (Ascension Eve), the Milanese Church prays: "We praise you above all on this day when Jesus Christ your Son our Lord brought to completion the mystery of our salvation and fulfilled the plan you formed long ago; that in his human body he should conquer and humble the devil, the enmy of your divine work, and lead our mortal nature to share the life of heaven."

That speaks to past and future. As for the present, as Pope Francis remarked at his April 17 General Audience: "The Ascension does not indicate the absence of Jesus, but tells us that He is alive among us in a new way; He is no longer in a definite place in the world as He was before the Ascension; He is now in the lordship of God, present in all space and time, next to each of us. We are never alone in our lives. We have this Advocate who waits for us. We are never alone, the Crucified and Risen Lord guides us, and with us there are many brothers and sisters who in silence and obscurity, in their life and work, in their problems and difficulties, their joys and hopes, live their faith every day and, together with us, bring to the world the lordship of God's love."

Bury the Dead

When I was a boy in Catholic school, lists to be memorized were standard fare in education and a big part of catechesis. We had the 10 Commandments, of course, but also the 6 Precepts of the church, the 4 marks of the Church, the 4 Cardinal Virtues, the 7 Gifts of the Holy Spirit, the 12 Fruits of the Holy Spirit, and the 7 corporal and 7 Spiritual Works of Mercy. Among the Corporal Works of Mercy, the seventh in the list was always "burying the dead."

Obviously there is nothing uniquely Catholic or Christian about the duty to bury the dead. Properly burying the bodies of the dead (or the equivalent in cultures which reverently practice cremation or the exposure of dead bodies) reflects a universal human impulse, a universal sense of the shared fragility of human life and the common experience of mortality. 

So the sorry spectacle being played out in Boston right now regarding the final disposition of the body of the Boston Marathon bomber is nothing for anyone to be particularly proud of.

I remember well the killing (on national TV) of Lee Harvey Oswald, just two days after he'd murdered President Kennedy. The next day (the same day the President was buried with a grandiose state funeral), Oswald was likewise buried - much more modestly, of course, but properly and with no mass protests or other indignities.

The sun shines and the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. Death comes to both the good and the bad. It diminishes neither a criminal's wickedness nor society's uprightness to dispose of his body in the customary way. True, some particularly notorious cases have warranted special precautions to prevent a malefactor's grave from becoming a symbol of political oposition or a shrine for malcontents to rally at. Nothing like that happened with Lee Harvey Oswald, and frankly I rather doubt anything like that would likely happen with Boston Marathon bomber's eventual burial site.

In an earllier, less intrusive world, it might have been possible to bury him quietly and privately and keep the site secret - as was done for the first few years with Mussolini, for example. Sadly that is hardly possible in today's "everything is public, everything is political" environment.

For as long as his crime is remembered, however, his name will be permanently disdained and his memory excoriated. But meanwhile let his body be put in the ground where it belongs - and where all of us, good and bad alike, are all eventually fated to go sooner or later.

Ambivalent Freedom

The May 23 issue of The New York Review of Books has an article by British writer Andrew O'Hagan http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/may/23/maggie/. It focuses on the lasting harmful social and communal effects of Margaret Thatcher's ideology and policies, resulting in what the author portrays as the virtual destruction of working class community life in Britain (especially in northern England and Scotland). 

The historical record of Thatcher and her policies is, of course, familiar and need not be belabored. What should most interest us today is what NYRB tellingly calls Thatcher's "moral legacy." For the the values promoted by Thatcherite ideology certainly seem to have become widely shared in elite circles and are sometimes seen as a model to be replicated. Indeed, the political and cultural priority presently being accorded to deficit reduction in this country (and even more problematically to "austerity" in Europe) - as opposed to such antiquated social goals - as full employment illustrates how deeply entrenched that model has become. 
Personalities are important in history, but personalities complicate analysis. Margaret Thatcher has her historical legacy, of course, but the moral legacy is not hers alone but belongs rather to the particular strain of social and economic philosphy which inspired not only her policies but many of the policies put in place in the U.S. in the intervening years. And ultimately it relates to the ambiguous moral dynamic of freedom itself, which modern economic freedom and post-modern moral freedom have further thrown out of balance.
A onetime grad school classmate of mine used to like to say that capitalism was an economic success but a moral disaster. Exactly how successful economically has always been a matter of some debate - as suggested by the plight of the once productive working classes in Britain and elsewhere and the current decline of our own American middle class. Its moral disasters, however, were well recongized by almost everyone until relatively recently. Historically no one ever summarized the economic accomplishments of capitalism better than Karl Marx, who famously wrote in The Communist Manifesto of 1848 (tr. Friedrich Engels, 1881): "It has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals." But, unlike capitalism's contemporary acolytes, Marx simultaneously highlighted its overwhelming and seemingly non-stop social and cultural destructiveness: "it has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations ... and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment.' It has drowned the heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimenatlism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom - Free Trade. ... All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned ..."
Classical conservatives and post-modern liberals largely recognize the price society - real people - have had to pay for the acknowledged benefits of a free and productive economy. There used to be almost a consensus about the need to regulate economic activity for the benefit of society. Within that consensus, the political debate was largely about how to achieve the optimal balance between economic freedom and social cohesion. The Thatcherite revolution smashed that consensus. Since then, the advocates of greater economic freedom - at whatever cost to social cohesion - have been winning. There are still voices advocating for more balanced policies that aim to rectify the social situation somewhat, but those voices have become relatively weak. A lot of that weakness has been self-inflicted.
In particular that weakness has been exacerbated by another long recognized consquence of capitalist excess - a libertarian revolution in personal and family morality, which has undermined the very social supports most beneficial to those who are being most hurt economically.

"It is the decision of the Holy Spirit and of us"

In the ancient world, the basic building blocks of society were the family and the household, which revolved around several pairs of relationships – male and female, parent and child, master and slave. These same distinctions were basic categories within the People of Israel as well, but there they were somewhat secondary to the fundamental division of the world into Jews and Gentiles.

So imagine the surprise when Gentiles started responding to the good news about Jesus and asking for baptism! Now it was possible for a Gentile to cross over to Judaism – to abandon pagan practices and convert to the worship of the one true God – but only by becoming what (in our terminology) we might call a “naturalized” Israelite, circumcised according to Mosaic practice, and separating from the Gentile world. The first Christians were Jews who had come to believe that Jesus was the Messiah sent by God to fulfill the promises made to Israel. Yet the Apostle Peter himself on at least one occasion and now Paul and Barnabas on a more regular basis had proclaimed the gospel to Gentiles and had baptized them - without requiring them to become Jews first. How was this possible?

No one should underestimate how unexpected and difficult this development was and how disruptive it was in the life of the early Church. It was every bit as challenging as it would have been to rethink the relationship of male and female or master and slave. No wonder there was disagreement and outright conflict!

And yet, faced with a crisis they certainly had not been expecting and for which nothing in their previous background had remotely prepared them, but on which the entire future of Christianity was going to depend, that first generation of Christians nonetheless faced the challenge to resolve the problem in a radically new way, reassessing everything they had assumed up until then in light of the fundamental experience they shared with the Gentile converts – faith in the Risen Lord Jesus Christ.

Now we all know how they solved the problem. We just heard the decision read to us [Acts 15:1-2, 22-29]. Just as Jews could follow Jesus and become Jewish Christians, so too Greeks, while still remaining Greek, could follow Jesus and become Greek – not Jewish – Christians. Likewise, Romans could become Roman Christians, etc. This radical decision simultaneously affirmed both the universal application of Christ to all peoples without exception, while also allowing for diversity within what, in today’s terminology, we would call a multi-cultural Church. Historically, it was this decision that made it possible for Christianity to expand throughout the ancient world and to continue to expand into a truly global community.

Thanks to that fundamental experience, that both Jewish and Gentile converts shared, of the new thing that had happened in the world with Jesus, they felt empowered to resolve the problem. Note their choice of words: “It is the decision of the Holy Spirit and of us.”

In the ancient Mediterranean world of small city-states, the greatest thing one could be was a citizen, entitled to participate in community discussion and debate. But citizenship as an active way of life (as opposed to just passive possession of rights and privileges) had seriously deteriorated as small city-states had been absorbed into one enormous empire. Discussion and debate had diminished, and people had lost the sense that they could accomplish anything through political participation. Yet, faced with the unexpected, the Christians felt able to resolve it by confidently open discussion and debate. Their confidence, of course, was in the Holy Spirit, the Risen Christ’s gift to his Church. When they said “It is the decision of the Holy Spirit and of us,” they were not equating themselves with the Holy Spirit but rather were recognizing that the Holy Spirit had really been at work in what was happening – Gentiles joining the Church – and was with them then in their collective effort to make sense of it.

So often we feel overwhelmed by problems - rather than challenged by them – and so react passively, as if we were silent spectators in the story of our lives. It was not easy for the early Christians to give up their inherited assumptions about the necessity of circumcision and Jewish observance. But they were empowered to do so by the power of the Risen Christ continually present and active in his Church through the Holy Spirit, teaching them to interpret their new experience.

The history of the Church was irrevocably shaped by this event. This “Council of Jerusalem,” as it came to be called, became a model for how to come to grips with new and pressing problems – neither never moving forward nor casually jettisoning the past, but rather carefully considering everything in light of the fundamental experience of what the Risen Christ has revealed.

As a result, the new Jerusalem is an all-inclusive, yet widely diverse society, in which the Risen Lord has brought us all together as one new people and has empowered us with his peace [John 14:27] – not quite peace as the world gives peace, but precisely the kind of peace the world needs so much.

Homily for the 6^th Sunday of Easter, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, May 5, 2013.