An Old Book About an Almost Forgotten Time

Recently, someone asked me if I had a copy of James Gillis: Paullist, the biography of the famous priest, written by Father James F. Finley in 1958. I had to admit that I didn't have one (and, in fact, had never read it). Asked if I would like his copy, I said, "Of course," and I told him how the author had lived with us when I was a novice and had begun one of his talks to our group with the same vivid image of the throngs converging on the Paulists' New York parish church to hear Gillis lecture on "False Prophets" on Sunday evening, October 21, 1923, with which the book begins.

Father James Martin Gillis (1876-1957) was an interestingly complex figure. He advocated for African-Americans' rights and spoke out against anti-Semitism. Sadly, however, his memory has been forever tarnished by his isolationist opposition to President Franklin Roosevelt and his embrace of the "America First" movement. Politics aside, however, through his preaching, lecturing, magazine publishing, and radio ministry, he was undoubtedly one of the major public voices of the Catholic Church as it moved into the mainstream of American society in the first half of the 20th century, at a time when preaching, lecturing, magazine publishing, etc., mattered much more than they do now because people paid so much more attention to such things, whether because religion mattered more then or simply because there were fewer other distractions.. At Cardinal Cushing's insistence, what was then called the Catholic Information Center in Boston was named after Gillis in 1957.

To be honest, I read the book more because of its author than its subject. I was curious how he dealt with the religious community dimensions of Gillis' life  and how he addressed the less attractive aspects of Gillis' personality. I knew the book would be a well written entry into late 19th-century and early 20th-century Catholic life in the US from the perspective of mid-20th-century America, a time when the Catholic life in this country seemed most fully developed and when the standing and influence of the Catholic Church in this country seemed to be at its zenith. And that task the book does fulfill.

Boston-born Gillis was a smart student who graduated from Boston Latin School and eventually went on to seminary, where influenced by a talk given by a visitor, the famous priest Walter Elliott, Gillis found his inspiration. "I prayed to be a missionary with half the zeal of Walter Elliott," he recalled later in life. Ordained a Paulist priest in the first year of the 20th century, Gilllis went on to further studies and teaching, to parish work in Chicago, and from there on the then highly favored work of preaching Missions (including in his case Missions to non-Catholics), before setting into the main mission of his life in the form of the more famous works with which he is mostly (and uniquely) associated.

Finley highlights Gillis's accomplishments but also the dynamics that held him back, brilliance beset by personality flaws and a (perhaps not unrelated) propensity to illness. Also on display is unique challenge of individual stardom within the theoretical egalitarianism of religious community.

Notwithstanding the universal scope and relevance of such considerations, Finley's account - even while written within the world and Gillis had inhabited - already has an air of elegy. Of course, brilliant people will always strive, succeed, and suffer setbacks because of the limitations of their personalities and other circumstances beyond their control. Versions of that will happen in every time and place and will result in interestingly complex life stories worthy of the biographer's art. That said, Finley's account is less interesting for what it recalls about one now almost forgotten figure from the previous century than what it remembers and how it portrays the aspirations of that singular era.

City on a Hill

A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden [Matthew 5:14] is an image sometimes applied to the story which we Americans often like to tell about ourselves. Ronald Reagan quoted it in the 1980s. John F. Kennedy quoted it to the Massachusetts General Court in 1961 [photo], explicitly referencing its first application to America – John Winthrop’s famous sermon, A Model of Christian Charity, delivered in 1630 to the Massachusetts colonists still on board their ship.

Whatever that expression has since come to mean in modern American politics, for Winthrop its meaning was quite clear – and challenging. He said:

We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, patience, gentleness, and liberality. We must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace … For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.

Thanks to Winthrop and his New England Puritans, Jesus’ famous challenge to his disciples to be the light of the world and a city that cannot be hidden became a familiar and powerful American image of the sort of society to aspire to be, one which over time has attracted immigrants from all over the world.

Originally, of course, the image referred to the Church, called to continue Christ’s life and mission by being light for a dangerously dark world. But, in the dark of night a city might easily be hidden by the surrounding darkness, unless illuminated by the lights lit by its citizens’ shared efforts. It takes conscious commitment and cooperation, without which there is only darkness. Autonomy and competition cannot build a city, much less illuminate it. Making a fire, lighting a lamp, illuminating a city, none of that happens automatically. The illumination Jesus challenges us to bring about requires our commitment to the kingdom of God, the coming of which we pray for every day in the Lord’s Prayer – a world transformed by the saving power of Christ its King, where the forces of evil are in retreat, divisions are undone, and (as Winthrop said) we delight in each other, supporting one another in the ways he mentioned, without fear of the dark.

Jesus challenges us to side with the light and reject the dark. But that is not so easy as it sounds. For darkness still very much dominates the world.

Yet, in spite of all that is so terribly wrong in our world, Jesus invites us to follow him into his kingdom, with confidence in his light’s power. So, while people still die, the resurrection of Christ assures us that death no longer has the final word. And, although people in both private and public life still hate, exploit, insult, and abuse their power, yet God’s kingdom of justice, reconciliation, and peace has already begun to take root in our world – through our life together.

In the dark, it seems only natural to hate, exploit, insult, and oppose those who appear different from us in some way, and to be attracted to those who succeed in the world by doing such things, those the world admires and those the powerful praise as “winners.” It takes the fire of love to light the lamp of reconciliation and to illuminate a city with God’s justice and peace. On our own, we would long ago have been left in the dark; but Jesus himself has provided us with the fire to light up his city, freeing us to share that light with one another.

Of course, even a city set on a mountain has to draw its water from the ground below. The Church is not on some private planet all by itself, but very much a part of this time, this place, this society. Hence, Governor Winthrop’s detailed instructions to his fellow settlers on what being an authentic human community must entail – instructions every bit as timely today as they were then.

There is a darker approach to life in the world, one which seems increasingly to set society’s tone today, a transactional approach which sees everything in life in terms of competition – in which everything becomes a kind of zero-sum game of winners and losers. But, just as the light of any one individual candle will continue to burn with its full brightness, no matter how many more may be lit from it from it, we need not worry that the light will be lost if we share with others. Jesus does not want us to huddle, frightened and fretful, around a weakly lit fire, but to be a bright, well-lit city that not only can but wants to be seen for miles around – a new kind of community that already in the here and now has begun to live the new life of God’s kingdom, a city that not only cannot be hidden but that can, quite literally, light up the world.

Homily for the 5th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville TN, February 9, 2020.

Faith and Prayer

“The allegations made in the articles of impeachment are very serious. As a Senator-juror, I swore an oath, before God, to exercise 'impartial justice.' I am a profoundly religious person. I take an oath before God as enormously consequential. … my promise before God to apply impartial justice required that I put my personal feelings and biases aside. Were I to ignore the evidence that has been presented, and disregard what I believe my oath and the Constitution demands of me for the sake of a partisan end, it would, I fear, expose my character to history’s rebuke and the censure of my own conscience. … I am sure to hear abuse from the president and his supporters. Does anyone seriously believe I would consent to these consequences other than from an inescapable conviction that my oath before God demanded it of me?"

Hearing Mitt Romney, the only Republican Senator to cut through Republican hypocrisy  and cross party lines in Wednesday's impeachment vote, take his oath to God seriously was, said Stephen Colbert. “like finding water in the desert.”

And what a desert American religion is in right now! That desert was fully on display the very next morning at the so-called National Prayer Breakfast. That event dates back to the middle of the last century, and every US President since Eisenhower has participated in this once honorable event. Speakng just before the President, this year’s keynote speaker, Arthur Brooks, author of Love Your Enemies, addressed the audience of more than 3,000 on that foundationally Christian theme. Then the recently impeached President spoke and expressed his essential disagreement with the keynote!

On such occasions, I am again reminded of my favorite quite from Southern Baptist Russell Moore back in October 2016, regarding ostensibly religious figures who ally themselves with this President:  "The religious right turns out to be the people the religious right warned us about."

Mitt Romney's father, George, who also aspired unsuccessfully for the presidency back in the 1960s, was born in Mexico where his devout Mormon grandparents had had to flee to avoid persecution by the US. government. A practicing member of the LDS Church, Mitt Romney, knows something about real religious persecution and real religious freedom - in contrast to the fevered "Flight 93" apocalypticism so often invoked by some ostensibly religious people to justify their alliance with this impeached President. This week Romney reminded anyone who was listening that faith is about God and God's Kingdom and not about political power and idolatrous prayer.

Impeachment Postmortem

It's over at last! To no one's surprise, the Republican Senate has acquitted President Trump, the third president in US history to have been impeached by the House. How history will remember this strange episode remains to be seen. In the present, whatever good one may have hoped might have come from this experience, its short-term effects seem largely negative. That too should hardly come as any great surprise, which is why Speaker Pelosi wisely resisted pursuing impeachment for such a long time, until circumstances left her with little option. 

Last June I wrote on this site "that the one person who stands to benefit the most from an impeachment proceeding is President Trump himself, which may explain his increasingly provocative and obstructive behavior towards Congress, as if he were practically provoking the House to move toward impeachment." Like most observers, I anticipated the President's acquittal, "with the vote breaking down, more or less, along party lines." All of which suggested to me at the time that "Democrats would do better (1) to investigate but not impeach, (2) to legislate more than investigate, and (3) to nominate a successful candidate and evict Trump from the White House the old fashioned way by winning a mandate from the American electorate." That was my view then and remains my view now.

That is not to deny that the President acted in a corrupt manner (already obvious the day the original phone transcript was released) which certainly merited investigation and impeachment - and probably conviction by the Senate. Nor do I deny that the House made a credible and compelling legal and moral case for the president's removal. But, to repeat what ought to be obvious, impeachment is a political process to be embraced or avoided according to the virtue of political prudence.  Hence, however clear the facts, reasonable observers  could plausibly disagree on whether or not to impeach and on whether or not to convict.

The initial impulse for impeaching the president reflected a particular wing of the Democratic party's preference for expressive rather than effective politics. As expressive political behavior, impeachment was theatrical and symbolic in the extreme. As effective political action, it was inevitably an extreme failure. 

Speaker Pelosi, who famously once said that impeachment needed to be bipartisan, understood this, as did many others; but the combination of the President's wildly inappropriate behavior together with increasing pressure from the more extreme elements of the Democratic House Caucus pushed the House Democrats in this problematic direction.

What could the Democrats have done differently? One thing the House could conceivably have done would have been to appoint a Select Committee to investigate the President's Ukraine phone call and related actions - analogous to the 1973 Senate Watergate Select Committee. In 1973, that committee's televised hearings helped move public opinion, which eventually (with help from various other factors including the President's own behavior), led to Nixon's increasing loss in popular support, which was what finally led to his resignation. Given contemporary Republican tribalism, a 1970s Nixon-like outcome was always an unlikely scenario. So then the obvious course would have been for the committee to aim to reveal and clarify as much as possible and then to take it all to the voters - into whose hands Trump's fate has at last been returned.

Thanks to this imbroglio, Trump's approval has reached an all-time high of 49%. That's not as high as Clinton's approval after his impeachment trial, but it is the highest he has ever gotten, which is hardly an encouraging assessment of the impeachment effort. It is certainly a timely reminder that this President and his supine supporters in Congress will not be easy for anyone to defeat at the polls.

But now that the primary campaign has officially begun, the Democrats need to get back to where they should have been focused all along, before they got distracted by impeachment Their task is to nominate a successful candidate who can evict Trump from the White House the old fashioned way by winning a mandate from the American electorate, something their bickering, divided party is not presently  demonstrating its readiness to do.

On to New Hampshire

As the dust settles from the media disappointment at the lack of immediately reportable results from the Iowa Caucus, it is time to consider the Iowa votes themselves and what they may say about the emerging shape of the Democratic race as it moves on to New Hampshire and beyond. Long before the Iowa Caucuses acquired the importance they have had since Jimmy Carter's time, the New Hampshire primary was the "first in the nation" event. (It was in New Hampshire in 1968 that Eugene McCarthy famously did well enough - without winning - to motivate Robert Kennedy to run and Lyndon Johnson to quit.)

So far, with some 71% of precincts reporting, Pete Buttigieg leads with 419 State Delegate Equivalents (26.8%) to Bernie Sanders' 394 (25.2%) and leads in 60 counties to Sanders' 18. In terms of individual votes, Sanders did beat Buttigieg in the first round, 31,428 (24.4%) to 27,515 (21.4%), but that lead narrowed significantly in the second round, 32,772 (26.2%) to 31,458 (25.2%). There may be more movement as the remaining returns are reported, but the pattern appears clear.

Sanders was expected to do well, and (as expected) younger voters tended to go for Sanders. If Sanders becomes the frontrunner after New Hampshire, the Democrats risk repeating what the Republicans experienced in 2016 when a supposedly implausible and unelectable candidate and his zealous base took over a divided party. The question then would be whether the desire to win would motivate mainstream Democrats to unite behind such an extreme candidate (as the Republicans successfully did in 2016).

On the other hand, Pete Buttigieg seems to have done better than expected among younger voters and, most importantly, did very well in the second round. As Michael Sean Winters wrote in The National Catholic Reporter, one "cannot think of a better test of a candidate's ability to unite the Democratic Party than to outpace other leaders in the ability to attract voters who originally supported someone else." If Mayor Pete can do that, then he could well be the candidate best positioned to unite the party - and thus well positioned to win in November. 

Of course, that assumes that Biden's poor showing in Iowa finally slows down his momentum as the presumed frontrunner, and that Buttigieg can follow up his impressive performance in Iowa with successful appeals to more diverse electorates - notably the upcoming primaries in Nevada and South Carolina.

The Senator from Maine and the Senator from Massachusetts may enjoy "favorite son" (and daughter) advantages in New Hampshire, which may complicate matters somewhat. Still, if Buttigieg performs well and Biden less so, that will be telling us something.

One thing this all seems to be suggesting is that, while not all Democrats are yet on board with Sanders' somewhat more extreme sounding agenda, many of them do want a change from the Old Guard's politics as usual. Whatever Iowa was, it was not a vote for Biden's fantasy of a post-Trump return to normalcy.