Sisters

Understanding U.S. Catholic Sisters Today is the title of a recent report by Kathleen Sprows Cummings for FADICA ("Foundations and Donors Interested in Catholic Activities"), a network of over 50 private foundations and donors committed to supporting Catholic-sponsored programs and institutions. The report has received a lot of attention, in large part because of its attention-getting opening sentence: "today there are approximately the same number of Catholic sisters int he United States as there were a century ago-just under 50, 000." The report also opens by citing a recent study that some 8% of never-married millennial women have considered a religious vocation, of whom 2% have considered it "very seriously." 

All this is good news, of course - up to a point. It suggests "the crowded novitiates and overflowing convents of the mid-twentieth century represent an anomaly in the history of U.S. women's religious life rather than a standard to which sisters could or should return. this perspective helps to diffuse the pessimism that often surrounds discussions of religious life." 

On the other hand, as the report recognizes, the fact that there are as many sister snow as a century ago says nothing about that number relative to the size of the American Catholic population (considerably larger now than a century ago) or about the relative median age of sisters (considerably higher now than a century ago). The latter numbers are particularly discouraging: 91% of finally professed sisters were age 60 and over in 2009, and more than two-thirds of men and women religious are older than 65. So, while there is certainly good news, the challenge for the future of viable religious life in the U.S. remains real and pressing.

Discussions of the real or imagined decline of religious life in the U.S. tend to be polarized along ideological liens, reflected somewhat (at least to the outside world) in the existence of two apparently competing organizations for women religious in the U.S. and the very visible difference between sisters who look like sisters (i.e., wear habits) and those who don't. the report provides some helpful clarification and nuance to this debate. The broad generalization that younger religious are more likely to prefer the habit and want community life seems to be borne out, but the report also highlights the more problematic side of this, in that those younger religious are also significantly unrepresentative of millennial Catholic, a majority of whom reject several significant Catholic positions. thus the report warns: "If institutes only draw members from a subset-within-a-subset (in other words, the small and atypical minority of the youngest age cohort of U.S. Catholics) future priests and religious may becoming increasingly removed from the beliefs and interests of the majority of their generational cohort—which could make attracting new members even more difficult."

Two other areas which may continue to prove challenging for recruitment, according to this report, are the perhaps perennial problem of the vagueness of much religious conversation about charism and the very contemporary problem of candidates coming with substantial student debt. With regard to the first, the report suggests: “Unless religious institutes develop an identity that can be easily and clearly articulated to the outside world, both in Catholic settings and in the wider culture (i.e. portrayals in the media), they will not attract many new members. Furthermore, if women’s religious institutes do not define themselves clearly, they risk letting themselves be defined by others, which may, in turn, increase polarization and further reduce the attractiveness of religious life among potential members.”

With regard to the second, the report notes one in three inquirers into a congregation has a student loan, and the average debt is $26,800. By the time of formal application, the average debt is $21,000. The result: 90% of congregations asked at least one applicant to delay, and 70% turned down at least one person. "Religious congregations do not want candidates’ guilt about burdening a congregation with student loans to dissuade them from pursuing a vocation. At the same time, the institutes do not want to make educational debt a top or even exclusive consideration in debating whether or not to accept a candidate. Yet with other financial responsibilities, such as rising health care costs that are particularly formidable for the already-aging sister population, concern regarding educational debt is an increasingly significant aspect of the discernment process for both the institute and the individual."

That we are at least talking about these problems, rather than about not having any applicants at all, is certainly a good sign. But these challenges certainly remain serious obstacles to any hoped-for flourishing of religious life - both men's and women's communities - in the United States in the foreseeable future.

Trumped

On one level, of course, the Trump phenomenon simply represents an apparently more extreme, but logical development of his political party's electoral dilemma. If you are a party whose primary policy purpose is to rig the system to guarantee the continued enrichment of a small economic elite, more or less at the expense of everyone else, you need a strategy - and certain strategic issues - to appeal to others who do not necessarily stand to gain from your party's economic agenda but whose electoral support is essential for your party to achieve power. So you appeal and create an emotional connection on cultural kinds of issues - guns, religion, racism, xenophobia, etc. The Southern Democrats did something similar for nearly a century, using racist appeals and the emotional connection racism generated among whites of all classes to maintain the electoral loyalty of poor white voters - hence keeping the local elite's power secure.

For decades, Republican politicians have been appealing to the status insecurities of older, often downward mobile white Americans, many of whom are among the primary losers in our post-modern globalized economy. Racism and xenophobia have always been present in American society, but have been most potent in such periods of economic and cultural change. As the ethnic, racial, and religious composition of American society evolves, and as traditional norms and expectations are being rapidly undermined (more rapidly that perhaps anyone would have expected even 20 years ago), such divisive appeals are ever more effective with certain segments of the population.

In the past, political elites could manage such divisive rhetoric and rein it in when it became too threatening to social cohesion. Nowadays, however, such elites exercise less power, for several reasons, in particular the sorting out of the American population into separate ideological tribes with ideology-reinforcing, separate sources of news (and hence separate "facts") and the widespread explosion of divisive, fact-free, rhetoric in talk radio and social media. From flirting with "Birtherism," to demeaning and threatening immigrants, and now singling out Muslims world-wide as objects of hostility, Trumpism has liberated the most dysfunctional aspects of American political culture from the feeble remnants of elite restraints, leaving "establishment" elites looking not only powerless but rather ridiculous.

For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind (Hosea 8:7).

Through the Open Door

Today, on the solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, on the 50th anniversary of the close of the Second Vatican council, and on the 1000th day of his own papacy, Pope Francis opened the Holy Door at Saint Peter's Basilica to begin the Extraordinary Jubilee Year of Mercy.

"This Extraordinary Year," the Holy father assured the world in his homily at the Mass that preceded the opening of the Holy Door, "is itself a gift of grace.  To pass through the Holy Door means to rediscover the infinite mercy of the Father who welcomes everyone and goes out personally to encounter each of them.  It is he who seeks us!  It is he who comes to encounter us!  This will be a year in which we grow ever more convinced of God’s mercy."

As was the case 50+ years ago when Saint John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council, the advent of this Holy Year is overshadowed by any number of prophets of doom who worry whether this is the right time for such an initiative with the civilized world in so much danger from the forces of barbarism. But I remember how the very first month of the Council's deliberations was overshadowed by the greatest crisis of the nuclear age, the Cuban Missile Crisis. That time it was two civilized societies that went to the brink - and brought the world to the brink - of nuclear annihilation. None of that minimizes, of course, the true dangers that beset us or the need for policymakers to take adequate and appropriate action to repel today's threats to civilized life. But it is a reminder of where our priorities need to be and remain.

"In passing through the Holy Door," the Pope continued in his homily, "may we feel that we ourselves are part of this mystery of love, of tenderness.  Let us set aside all fear and dread, for these do not befit men and women who are loved.  Instead, let us experience the joy of encountering that grace which transforms all things."

This Jubilee Year reminds us that there can be no substitute for authentic encounter in the relationship between God's word and the world, between the Church and the world. As Pope Francis reminded us regarding the Council:

"Before all else, the Council was an encounter.  A genuine encounter between the Church and the men and women of our time.  An encounter marked by the power of the Spirit, who impelled the Church to emerge from the shoals which for years had kept her self-enclosed so as to set out once again, with enthusiasm, on her missionary journey.  It was the resumption of a journey of encountering people where they live: in their cities and homes, in their workplaces.  Wherever there are people, the Church is called to reach out to them and to bring the joy of the Gospel, and the mercy and forgiveness of God.  After these decades, we again take up this missionary drive with the same power and enthusiasm.  The Jubilee challenges us to this openness, and demands that we not neglect the spirit which emerged from Vatican II, the spirit of the Samaritan, as Blessed Paul VI expressed it at the conclusion of the Council.  May our passing through the Holy Door today commit us to making our own the mercy of the Good Samaritan."

I could hardly help hearing echoes of Isaac Hecker (specifically his famous 1963 sermon, "The Saint of Our Day"), in the Pope reference to "encountering people where they live: in their cities and homes, in their workplaces." Such references remind us of the perennial nature of the Church's internal and external evangelizing mission and of the challenge of encounter. 

When I last walked through the Holy door at Saint Peter's in November 2000, I hardly ever expected to have such an opportunity again in my lifetime. May we all - individually and as a Church - make the most of it!

Our Hope in Terrible Days

In 1497, the University of Paris decreed that no one should be admitted to the University without swearing to assert and defend the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Imagine if that rule were still in force! It would certainly be a very different world!

Just 161 years ago, in the year 1854, Blessed Pope Pius IX (who would soon bless Father Isaac Hecker’s project for the founding of the Paulist Fathers) finally defined the heart of the Church’s faith about Mary’s Immaculate Conception – our belief that, thanks to the salvation accomplished by her Son, Mary was preserved from all sin from the very beginning of her earthly existence and thus came into the world completely holy. Just one year later, the small but growing Catholic community in East Tennessee placed their first church and parish here in Knoxville under the heavenly patronage of the Immaculate Conception. And what an amazing 160 years we have had here up on this hill!

Meanwhile, in the middle of the 20th-century, an American monk Thomas Merton, who was one of the four famous Americans Pope Francis mentioned in his address to Congress back in September, said that the definition of the Immaculate Conception “was a turning point in the modern history of the Church. The world,” he wrote, “has been put into the hands of our Immaculate Lady and she is our hope in the terrible days we live in.” [November 10, 1947]      

Anticipating Merton’s hope a century earlier in 1846, the Bishops of the United States had proclaimed Mary the patroness of the United Sates under the title of her Immaculate Conception. So today, already an especially grace-filled day the entire Church, is even more especially so for our country and for our own local parish community.

The New Testament does not explicitly speak of the Immaculate Conception. So the Church today focuses our attention on the Annunciation [Luke 1:26-38], one of the most famous scenes in all of human history. The Annunciation was the centerpiece of Mary’s earthly life - from her Immaculate Conception to her Assumption - and the basis for her heavenly life since then as Mother of the Church. At the Annunciation, Mary’s life-long fullness of grace was first formally acknowledged. More importantly, at the Annunciation, her life-long fullness of grace led her to answer “Yes” to God’s great plan to save the world with his mercy. For Mary is the living open door through whom Christ comes into the world so that we may enter into God’s kingdom.

In less than 10 hours, Pope Francis will begin an Extraordinary Jubilee Year by opening the Holy Door at Saint Peter’s Basilica, the Holy Door which symbolizes the great open door of God’s mercy. The design of the Holy Door presently in use at Saint Peter’s dates back to the Holy Year of 1950. It consists of sixteen bronze panels. The four panels on the top row depict both the exile of Adam and Eve after the Fall and the Annunciation, when Mary’s “Yes” altered Adam and Eve’s “No” as the default response of the human race’s response to God’s mercy.

Every Holy Year is an invitation to go on pilgrimage – to pass as pilgrims through the Holy Doors in Rome and through our local door of Mercy soon to be opened for pilgrims at our own Cathedral Church.  That ritual act of pilgrimage symbolizes the movement and direction of a faith-filled life, a life lived in grace-filled response to God’s mercy, as Mary lived every instant of her life from her Immaculate Conception to her Assumption. We must let that image of pilgrimage guide us in our own observance of the Holy Year of Mercy. The Holy Year pilgrimage, Pope Francis has reminded us, “represents the journey each of us makes in this life … by crossing the threshold of the Holy Door, we will find the strength to embrace God’s mercy and dedicate ourselves to being merciful with others as the Father has been with us” [Misericordiae Vultus, 12].

Homily for the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception on the Eve of the Opening of the Year of Mercy, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, December 7, 2015.

Lighting the Tree

In the next-to-the-last episode of the excellent 2014 PBS series The Roosevelts, there is a poignant portrayal of the lighting of the White House Christmas Tree on December 24, 1941, just weeks into the war, with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill present as one of the most memorable White House Christmas guests in history. Tonight, albeit with much less fanfare and much less world historical significance, I will, for the 6th year in a row, light our parish Christmas Tree in front of the church on wintry, windswept Summit Hill. (The photo at left is the tree as it looks now during the day, waiting to be lit tonight.)

It is usually assumed that ancient pagan winter festivities incorporated evergreens and thus represent the remote folkloric origin of our northern European Christmas Tree. Some also see antecedents of the Christmas Tree in the Garden of Eden’s Tree of Knowledge, In medieval mystery plays on Christmas Eve (traditionally also the feast day of Adam and Eve), an evergreen decorated with apples was sometimes used to represent the Tree of Knowledge and its forbidden fruit. From there it may have migrated into the home, where actual apples might be replaced by all sorts of ornaments. And then, of course, the 16th-century founder of German Protestantism, Martin Luther, is commonly credited with having been the one who added lit candles to the Tree. It has even been suggested that well-to-do Protestant families might have adopted the custom as an alternative to the nativity scenes in Roman Catholic homes. But the custom was introduced in Vienna early in the 19th century and soon spread throughout Catholic Austria. Meanwhile, Queen Charlotte (wife of King George III) is credited with introducing the custom in Britain. And then an 1848 woodcut of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and their children with their Christmas tree at Windsor Castle was adapted in an American publication two years later in what became probably the first widely circulated picture of a Christmas Tree in the U.S. 

In Sicily, my grandparents certainly never had a Christmas Tree. But, after immigrating to New York after World War I they immediately adopted the prevailing American custom. By my time, the Christmas Tree was the central domestic decoration of the season, although, of course, the traditional presepio continued to retain a place of special honor in our home. Our tree was usually purchased a few days before Christmas. Decorating it took considerable time, typically until sometime on December 24 itself. Also a day or so before, a lit Christmas Tree would be set up above the main door of our parish church across the street from our apartment. Inside the church, however, no trees appeared until Christmas Eve itself, when the sanctuary was transformed into a veritable Christmas forrest.

As a 4th-year graduate student, living with two roommates in a sublet faculty apartment on Lake Carnegie in 1975, I secured a second-hand artificial tree and some of my parents' redundant lights and ornaments to bring Christmas into our simple apartment. I remember the look of joy on my roommate's face as we decorated our humble tree that year. (I detest and totally disapprove of the use of artificial Christmas Trees, but it was a very imperfect world in 1975, even on an Ivy League campus!)

Nowadays, everyone decorates for Christmas much earlier than we used to. So the suspense is gone. The sense of build-up to finishing the job on Christmas Eve is lost. And, of course, at the other end of the process now there are all those already discarded trees to be seen, sadly, in the street on the 2nd Day of Christmas!

Still, the Christmas Tree remains enthroned as the central decoration of the season. As we light our tree tonight, we will pray the prayer the Church provides: May this tree, arrayed in splendor, remind us of the life-giving cross of Christ, that we may rejoice in the new life that shines in our hearts.