The Late Show with

I'm, old enough, of course, to remember Johnny Carson and Jack Parr and all the other late night talk-show hosts whose shows have made their mark on American TV and, thanks to TV's unique power in our society, have likewise made a lasting mark on American culture. But I have generally been an outsider to the late-night TV experience, having watched such shows only on the rarest occasions. Any number of times, I have walked past the Ed Sullivan Theater in Manhattan, past the lines of those waiting to get in to see David Letterman, and I have obviously seen clips of Letterman on the news and elsewhere, but (for whatever reason) I have never felt drawn to watch the actual show. The same has been true of the more modern late-night stars so favored by younger viewers - e.g., Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. But with colbert's ascension  to the Late Show with as David Letterman' heir, I thought it time to join the party - not, of course, at the absurdly late hour (11:30 p.m.) when the show is actually aired, but recorded and watched later the next day at my own convenience. What could be more modern than that?

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert premiered on CBS on Tuesday, September 8, in the redecorated Ed Sullivan Theater. While Colbert is the star and carries the show, the show's band Stay Human led by Jon Batiste is integral to the overall feel of the performance, as is the youngish audience's on-cue thunderous chanting of "Stephen, Stephen ..."

Unlike their earlier incarnations, all modern talk shows - even the staid Sunday morning variants - conform to the requirement of our Attention Deficit Disorder culture and move from quickly back and forth from one act to another. Not only is Colbert a bright and quick comedian, he seems to display all the other talents needed to hold an audience's attention - whether interviewing a politician or tech entrepreneur, or doing the traditional monologue, or clowning around with the band, or dancing, or even just jumping around. In short, he does all things well, which, with good looks and abundant energy, should guarantee great success. 

Clearly Colbert is also quite a star conversationalist, and can conduct non-trivial exchanges with the politicians who cannot resist free exposure to his enormous audience. His first-week interviews with Jeb Bush and with Vice President Joe Biden were superb, the latter especially getting widespread coverage because of the high quality of the conversation. Politicians doing late-night entertainment has become a staple of American politics, and has long since replaced Meet the Press as a prime media venue for reaching an audience.

The degeneration of politics into entertainment may well be lamented, but it was already a an established and entrenched fact well before Colbert inherited The Late Show. Because Colbert is so good at the showmanship part, his brilliance shows through that much more. If, as Dick Cavett has suggested (on Sunday morning's Reliable Sources show), Colbert will likely feature and highlight genuinely serious conversations, he may make some significant contribution to putting the politics back in at least some of our country's political discourse.

Thinking as God Does

Today’s gospel account [Mark 8:27-35] comes at the midpoint of Saint Mark’s Gospel, more or less at the midpoint of Jesus’ public life. It also seems to be something of a midpoint in the disciples’ own experience – in their gradual growth in understanding Jesus’ true identity and in what that must mean for them.

Mark begins by telling us that Jesus and his disciples set out for the villages of Caesarea Philippi. In other words, they left their familiar surroundings and went again into pagan, Gentile territory. Today, that area at the foot of Mount Hermon on Israel’s northern border with Syria is known as “Banyas,” a variation on an older Greek word suggesting a place sacred to the god “Pan.” Unlike so many other historic sites in Israel, where a church stands to commemorate some biblical event, nothing of the sort marks this site. The absence of any church or shrine and the persistence of the area’s pagan name evoke its original character as a pagan, worldly place. (In Jesus’ time, it had a pagan temple with a thriving fertility cult. But, when I visited the site in 1993 the only activity there was an Israeli army unit enjoying a picnic!)

Having brought them to that pagan, worldly place, Jesus paused there to ask them what was maybe the most important question they had ever yet been asked - the question that in some form or other anyone who purports to be a Christian must also ask and answer, who do you say that I am?

Jesus first asked what other people were saying about him. They didn’t have modern polling methods back then. But, just as we would expect if that same question were asked today, he got a variety of different answers. Then as now, Jesus meant different things to different people, all of whom naturally tried to fit him into their already existing ways of thinking. Jesus then revised his question to focus directly on his special group of followers: But who do you say that I am?

Peter, already anticipating his role as leader of the Church, answered for them – and for us – You are the Christ (in other words, the Messiah), the One anointed by God.

What a wonderful, inspiring insight – one for which Peter has always been remembered and honored!  If only the story had ended there! But the conversation continued. And, as the rest of the story shows, Peter did not yet really understand what it actually meant that Jesus is the Christ, because he didn’t yet really understand what kind of Messiah Jesus actually is. So, Jesus responded to Peter’s initial insight with the seemingly strange command not to tell anyone about him, followed in fairly short order by his even more surprising,  shockingly stern reproof to Peter: Get behind me, Satan. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.

None of which should this surprise us. Like Peter, we all want Jesus to be the kind of Messiah that we want, and so we are all tempted to see him through a lens of our own imagining, thinking not as God does, but as human beings do. Every age and every culture, that has concerned itself with Jesus at all, has done the same. So has every artist and every author, who has portrayed Jesus. In Peter’s case, after all, there was certainly nothing in what he had been taught that would have led him to expect – let alone want – a Messiah to be rejected and killed.

After Peter, the first several centuries of the Church’s history featured a series of serious disputes (and several ecumenical councils to debate those disputes) about who in fact Jesus is – who he is in relation to God and in relation to us. The complex formulas we recite every time we say or sing the Creed reflect the way those disputes were eventually resolved and so set some precise parameters to facilitate our fuller understanding of Jesus.

Every time we recite those formulas, as we do here every Sunday, we acknowledge who Jesus is and we commit ourselves to make the same journey in faith that Peter and the disciples had to make. Who do you say that Jesus is? Who do I say that Jesus is? Who do we together say that Jesus is? He constantly asks that question of each of us individually and of all of us together – not because he is looking for a novel answer (Christianity is about fidelity not creativity), but precisely because he has already answered it for us with his cross and resurrection.

In Saint Matthew’s Gospel, this same story is repeated but with an additional detail [Matthew 16:17-19], in which Jesus promises Peter the keys of the kingdom of heaven, in his new role not only as spokesman for his fellow disciples but as visible leader of Jesus’ Church on earth throughout history - Peter’s place being filled, generation after generation, by Peter’s successors as Bishops of Rome, down to his 265th  successor, our present Pope Francis, who next week will make his first-ever visit to the United States.

According to a recent survey, conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Religion News Service, some 31% of Catholics and 52% of Americans overall said they had heard nothing about the Pope’s upcoming trip. Of course, he has to compete with a lot of other news and noise and those who want to be the news and so are making a lot of that noise. What kind of noise will the Pope make?

Like the first Pope, Peter, his successor will speak on our behalf, articulating who Jesus really is and what difference he makes for each of us individually and all of us together, and for the world he loves so much that he became a part of it and has left us to care for as our common home.

Just as back then, Jesus means different things to different people. Just as back then, we all want Jesus to be the kind of Messiah that we want, and so we are all tempted to see him through a lens of our own cultural, economic, and political imagining, thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.

Amid all the noise that passes for news, Peter’s successor is coming to America to remind us who Jesus is and what that means for each one of us individually and for all of us together as his Church and for world he has entrusted to us as our common home.

Homily for the 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN,

September 13, 2015.

Bronx Gothic

Saint Nicholas of Tolentino (c.1246-1305) was an Italian Augustinian Friar, noted as a preacher, peacemaker, and confessor, and for his generosity to the poor (hence the Augustinian tradition of blessing and distributing "Saint Nicholas Bread"), and his prayer for the souls in purgatory. Pope Eugene IV recognized 30 miracles attributed to Nicholas when he canonized him in 1446 - the first Augustinian friar to be canonized. Today is his feast in the Augustinian calendar (as it was in the universal one until the brutal calendar reform of 1969). Pope Leo XIII proclaimed him patron of the souls in purgatory in 1884. Many Augustinian churches are dedicated tin his name - among them the great Gothic parish church of my childhood - referred to by some in those days as "the cathedral of the Bronx." Indeed, closing the celebration of the parish's 50th anniversary on September 10, 1957, New York's Francis Cardinal Spellman said, "Very few cities in the United Sates have cathedrals which have the beauty of your parish church." (The photo at left is from Easter 1963.)

Anglicized as Saint Nicholas of Tolentine, the new parish in the University Heights Fordham section of the Bronx (between St. John's, Fordham, and St. John's Kingsbridge) had celebrated its first Mass in a neighborhood garage on April 22, 1906. From the start, it was staffed by priests of the St. Thomas of Villanova Province of the Order of Saint Augustine. Fordham Road was then still largely an unpaved country road, but by my time that street and the densely populated neighborhood it served had become a bustling urban area of stores and apartment buildings. My parents were married in Tolentine's 1400-seat lower church in February 1947, and I was baptized there some 14 months later - though by the time I was conscious of such things the great Gothic 1200-seat upper church was finished and fully in use. (It was finally consecrated on September 9, 1957, by a Dutch Augustinian bishop then serving in Rome as papal sacristan, who also confirmed me later that month on the Province's patronal feast day, September 22.)

In post-war Catholic New York, parish and neighborhood were still often largely one and the same. That was certainly true of the Augustinians' Tolentine parish in the University Heights Fordham neighborhood of the Bronx - as it correspondingly was just a short walk west across the Harlem River at the Paulist Fathers' Good Shepherd parish In the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan's Washington Heights. In many ways, these were largely self-contained communities, from which, of course, people went out to work elsewhere in the city and within which the wider world's influence was certainly felt, but which when I was growing up met most of our day-to-day needs, both social and spiritual.

A lot of what made the Bronx beautiful (and its parish neighborhoods such great places to live and to grow up in) is now gone forever. But the University Heights Fordham section of the Bronx remains a bustling commercial and residential urban area, and the beautiful Gothic church still stands as the neighborhood's beating heart - still serving a diverse population, but now with Masses in Spanish and Vietnamese.

Tragically, the parish high school from which I graduated 50 years ago on June 25, 1965, was closed in 1991. But next month, the surviving members of the Tolentine High School Class of 1965 will gather (althoough sadly not there or even in the Bronx) for our 50th high school reunion. Some of those who will be attending are men I probably have not seen in 50 years, although I have in recent years reconnected at least superficially with a few of them by the modern miracle of Facebook. The reunion will include a "photo loop" of school days' pictures, a "memories table," posing for a new class photo, and of course a DJ playing music from our teen years. It will be simultaneously strange and wonderful. It won't bring back the world we have lost, but it should surely remind us what human and spiritual treasures that world contained.

Religious Liberty and the Law

In Robert Bolt's popular play about Saint Thomas More, A Man for All Seasons, there is a famous conversation between More and William Roper, about the value of the rule of law:

William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!

Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!

Whether or not that conversation ever actually occurred in exactly those words, what Saint Thomas More is represented as saying certainly reflects More's actual life and career as a public servant, devoted to the law, who faithfully served the Crown as Lord Chancellor, but then resigned from that exalted post when the expectations associated with that office suddenly conflicted with his higher religious commitments.

More's example is always edifying and always relevant, but perhaps especially so right now when novel claims of religious liberty are being put forward. I refer, of course, to the contentious case of the Kentucky County Clerk, Kim Davis, who, for refusing (on ostensibly religious grounds) to fulfil all the requirements the job she was elected to, recently spent some time in jail for contempt of court. 

One alternative, obviously, would have been for her simply to do her job and enforce the law - something civil servants routinely do all the time, something devout Christians do all the time, even if it means issuing marriage licenses or performing civil wedding ceremonies for couples whose marriages are religiously problematic (not just same-sex couples but also, for example, divorced people remarrying contrary to Jesus' explicit prohibition in the gospels). 

But, supposing one is personally convinced (correctly or not) that one cannot in good conscience issue such a marriage license, there remains always the second alternative - the very honorable alternative - of resignation. In his historic speech to the Houston Ministerial Association on September 12, 1960, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy famously said:
But if the time should ever come — and I do not concede any conflict to be even remotely possible — when my office would require me to either violate my conscience or violate the national interest, then I would resign the office; and I hope any conscientious public servant would do the same.

More recently in 2011, Justice Antonin Scalia said that he himself would resign if he "thought Catholic doctrine held the death penalty to be immoral." It was also Scalia who famously authored the Opinion of the Court in Employment Division v Smith (1990)  where he argued that the Free Exercise clause "does not relieve an individual of the obligation to comply with a law that incidentally forbids (or requires) the performance of an act that his religious belief requires (or forbids) if the law is not specifically directed to religious practice and is otherwise constitutional as applied to those who engage in the specified act for nonreligious reasons."  

Certainly, the United States has a long and commendable tradition of accommodating religious minorities. For example, back when we still had conscription, Quakers could - and did - register as conscientious objectors. As long as the job gets done, society is in every way better off when maximum freedom is provided for citizens to exercise their religious beliefs and practices. Thus, for example, if the County Clerk were a devout Jew, who would not sign a document on a Jewish religious holy day, it would be eminently reasonable for the state to authorize a Gentile deputy to do the signing on that day in his or her place. An analogous kind of arrangement was, I believe, proposed in the Kentucky case, but was not initially accepted by the clerk, which was one reason why she for a while found herself in jail. (I guess we'll see, when she returns to work today, what will happen now.)

As I said above, I know of no past case of any devout Christian refusing to sign a civil license for a divorced person remarrying even though such a marriage is contrary to Jesus's explicit prohibition against remarriage after divorce. I also know of no case of devout Catholic refusing to sign such a license for a divorced person remarrying civilly without the required Church annulment, or for a Catholic marrying civilly contrary to the canonical form, or for a not yet laicized priest marrying civilly in contravention of the Church's law of clerical celibacy. All of these are cases where a legal civil marriage is invalid in the judgment of the Church. Yet never, so far as I know, has it been asserted that it would be sinful for a Catholic clerk to sign such a licence in his or her civil capacity. On the contrary, we have long been accustomed to the idea that not all civil marriages are valid according to religious criteria, but that does not change the fact that they are civil marriages which the relevant civil officials are required to process as part of their job. So why should this situation be any different?

It might be possible (and hence desirable) to craft an explicit exception that somehow allows a clerk not to sign such marriage licenses on religious grounds.  As long as the requirements of the law are being met by someone else, society as a whole is better off when religious beliefs and practices are accommodated as generously as possible.

But my fear is that the exact opposite may likely happen.  I fear that the long-standing American consensus in support of the 1st Amendment may be eroded rather than strengthened by this kind of case, which is not the typical case of a religious individual or minority simply seeking freedom for themselves to live and act according to their beliefs, but a case of invoking one's own personal religious liberty to prevent others from exercising a different civil right also guaranteed (however mistakenly) by the civil law. Kim Davis is undoubtedly sincere in her beliefs, but her contentious approach to the responsibilities of her office (which she freely assumed and took an oath to fulfill) is not likely to win widespread acceptance in American society. If she becomes the poster person for the cause of religious liberty, then I fear that the cause of religious liberty may be the primary loser. That is a terrible shame, for there are real and serious religious liberty issues at stake in today's world.  But empowering people who have freely sought and accepted public office to refuse to carry out the responsibilities of that office (thereby possibly denying civil rights to others) surely cannot be one of them.

Called, Justified, and Glorified

Nativitatem Virginis Mariae celebremus; Christum eius Filium adoremus Dominum ("Let us celebrate the Nativity of the Virgin Mary; let us adore Christ the Lord her Son").

With that ancient Invitatory, the Church still summons us today to celebrate the birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Most saints are commemorated only on the day of their death. But, conceived without sin, Mary's earthly birth is also honored in the Church's calendar (as is also that of John the Baptist, who is understood to have been sanctified before birth at the time of the Visitation (cf. Luke 1:15).

Historical details about the circumstances of Mary's birth are, of course, largely lacking. Devotion has had to make due with ancient legends recounted in the 2nd-century Protoevangelium of James, from which we learn, for example, the traditional names ascribed to Mary's parents, Anne and Joachim. A 5th-century basilica, built in Jerusalem on the supposed site of their home (and thus of Mary's birth) was dedicated on this date. Hence, today's feast, which eventually made its way west to 7th-century Rome The gospel for this feast remains Matthew's genealogy of Jesus, tracing his lineage from Abraham through David to Joseph, Mary's husband. The traditional 1st reading used to be Proverbs 8:22-35, in which Wisdom is portrayed as speaking of herself as the first-born of his ways and the forerunner of his prodigies. The modern, Paul VI Lectionary has largely abandoned the old tradition of applying passages from the sapiential books to Mary. So instead of Proverbs, it provides a choice - either the familiar (but not particularly relevant) passage from the prophet Micah about Bethlehem (Micah 5:1-4a) or Paul's famous statement about how God's redemptive election has been at work conforming the elect to the image of Christ, calling, justifying, and glorifying (Romans 8:28-30). The latter certainly seems the more appropriate option.

The Tridentine Breviary included a fitting passage from Saint Augustine's Sermon 18, which begins: the day of the blessed and ever venerable Virgin Mary so long desired is here. Let our land rejoice in the greatest exultation. Let it shine in the light of the birth of such a virgin. For she is the flower of the field, from her blossomed the precious lily of the valley. Through her birth the nature inherited from our first parents is changed. Their sin is blotted out. That unhappy curse of Eve in which it was said, "In sorrow you shall bring forth children," is, in the case of Mary, ended, for she bore the Lord in joy.

The contemporary Breviary has replaced Augustine's sermon with a discourse by Saint Andrew of Crete, which concludes: Therefore let all creation sing and dance and unite to make worthy contribution to the celebration of this day. Let there be one common festival for saints in heaven and men on earth. Let everything, mundane things and those above, join in festive celebration. Today this created world is raised to the dignity of a holy place for him who made all things. The creature is newly prepared to be a divine dwelling place for the Creator.

Both these Office readings echo Paul's theme that God's redemptive plan is at work in the created world, elevating it to a new dignity and glory in Christ. Today we celebrate an especially significant moment in that timeline of salvation, in which by a sharing in that same graced experience of being called, justified, and glorified, we too are made beneficiaries.