The Challenge of a Nation in Pain

Five years ago, when the author of the widely read Hillbilly Elegy was still presenting himself as a serious thinker before donning his new MAGA hat to serve as altar boy in the idolatrous Trump cult, J.D. Vance effectively analyzed our national Trumpist malaise. "Trump is cultural heroin," he famously wrote. "He makes some people feel better for it. But he cannot fix what ails them" (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/opioid-of-the-masses/489911/).

What makes Vance's very well formulated former views still relevant, despite the depth to which he has since fallen, is that they really did diagnose at least some of the economic, aesthetic, domestic, political, and cultural dysfunctions that have brought our country to this crisis, which, like heroin itself, has "crept slowly" into American "families and communities - not by invasion but by invitation."

Employing his heroin/opioid analogy, Vance diagnosed the pain that so many seem to be seeking to dull. He identified economic pain, "as the factories that provided many U.S. towns and cities material security have downsized or altogether ceased to exist." He identified aesthetic pain, "as the storefronts that once made American towns beautiful and gave way to cash-for-gold stores and payday lenders." He identified domestic pain, "as rising divorce rates reveal home lives as dependable as steel-mill jobs." He identified political pain, "as Americans watch from afar while a government machine that rarely tries to speak to them, and acts in their interest even less, sputters alone. And he identified cultural pain, from the legitimate humiliation of losing wars fought by the nation's children to the illegitimate sense that some fall behind only because others jump ahead." 

The result has been what he calls "the vengeful joy of a Trump rally. That brief feeling of power, of defiance, of sending a message to the very political and media establishment that, for 45 years, has refused to listen. Trump brings power to those who hate their lack of it, and his message is tonic to communities that have felt nothing but decline for decades."

Meanwhile, of course, the establishment has continued to enjoy the opposite of decline. While jobs and homes were being lost, the Bush and Obama Administrations saved the perpetrators of the 2008 economic collapse. While riding to office in part on the unsatisfied anger of the victims of global capitalism, Trump promptly passed a tax cut for the richest elite in modern American history. And so on. Even now, as the hapless "infrastructure debate" drags pointlessly on, the political process continues to prove itself unable to repair our collapsing country, while the dysfunctional political elite remains enthralled by bygone fictions like "bipartisanship" and destructive elite rituals like the Senate filibuster.

There is more to the story, of course. All this largely unnecessary pain inflicted upon the many by the wealthy and powerful few has happened at a time of demographic and cultural transformation. Increased immigration and the election of our first non-white President did not cause these crises, but they triggered the neuralgic reactions long ago wired into our society by our national original sin of racism. No one needs to study "critical race theory" (whatever those words might actually mean outside academia) to know these basic facts of American history. One need only remember the violent overturning of Reconstruction (thus undoing what the military defeat of Confederate treason could have accomplished for fulfilling the American dream). Likewise, one need only remember the racist and anti-immigrant violence in the aftermath of World War I a century ago and the infamous anti-immigrant legislation of the 1920s.

That said, the pains Vance identified were real then and remain real now, intensified by the real and symbolic violence of the past five years, pains made even more acute by the economic, aesthetic, domestic, political, and cultural costs imposed on the overwhelming majority of Americans by the covid pandemic. Candidate Joe Biden's almost miraculous come-from-behind victory in the 2020 primaries opened a path for a majoritarian coalition to reclaim power. Yet, as long as government keeps proving itself increasingly incapable of resolving our nation's problems (even when a majority of voters have voted that way), we are in increasing danger of serious system collapse, culminating in extremist neo-populist tyranny.

It remains to be seen whether the Biden coalition can acquire sufficient political power - and relearn how to use it - in time to make a difference.

After the Primary

The results of the NYC mayoral primary have now been finalized. In the final round of ranked-choice voting, Brooklyn Borough President and former police captain Eric Adams narrowly defeated former City Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia. 

Adams led in the initial round with 31.8% of the vote. Maya Wiley came in second with 22.2%. and Kathryn Garcia came in third with 19.3%. The point of ranked-choice voting in situations such as this where no one candidate has a majority is to allow voters to indicate their second choice, thus hopefully producing a kind of consensus winner. In such a system, Adams' plurality need not necessarily have translated into an eventual majority, but in this case it narrowly did. by Round 7, with all but the top four candidates eliminated, Adams had 35.5%, Wiley 26.8%, Garcia 23.8%, and Andrew Yang 13.9%. Round 8 eliminate Yang and gave Adams 40.9%, Wiley 29.5%, and Garcia 29.6%. Garcia's narrow lead over Wiley eliminated her and resulted in the final round in which Adams won with 50.5% with Garcia second with 49.5%.

In the end, the result, while close, was clear. Adams carried every borough except Manhattan in the first-choice tally, and was the winner among working-class Black and Latino voters and also did well with white moderate voters who held more moderate views, which (as the NY Times noted) is similar to the coalition that gave the Democratic nomination to President Biden in 2020. 

Garcia was also popular with white moderate voters across the five boroughs, but dominated in wealthy Manhattan, where she appealed to highly educated, affluent voters, while doing less well with voters of color, but well enough overall to come in second over Wiley, the unambiguously progressive, left-wing candidate.

This would all seem to be further evidence of what we witnessed in the 2020 presidential primaries - the continuing role of Black voters as a moderating force in the Democratic Party, a party which has (largely though its own fault) lost much of its traditional white working class base, while meanwhile more and more of its more educated and affluent white non-working class voters have moved decisively in a direction that seems increasingly guaranteed to alienate much of both that traditional white working-class base that is gone and the (also predominantly working class) Black base that remains.

The lesson(s) for Democrats who would like to keep control of Congress in 2022 and want to keep Trump from being reelected in 2024 should be obvious. Given the importance of those goals for the survival of the Democratic Party and (more importantly) for the health of democratic and constitutional governance in this country, the relevance of these post-primary lessons should also be obvious.

(Image: The flag of the City of New York. The city's famous flag displays the Seal of New York City in blue in the white center bar of a blue, white, and orange vertical tricolor, representing the Prince of Orange's flag used in the original Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, which eventually became New York.)

Man of the Church

On this date in New York City in 1858, four American Catholic priests - all converts to Catholicism and all just recently released from membership in the Redemptorist Order - formed the Society of Missionary Priests of Saint Paul the Apostle, known ever since as the Paulist Fathers. Three days later, came the creation a new parish on Manhattan's West Side for the new community’s ministry, Saint Paul the Apostle, located near what is now Columbus Circle 

Their leader in this ambitious enterprise, Isaac Thomas Hecker (1819-1888), had been born to an immigrant family in New York City and from an early age had become convinced that God had some special plan for his life. His older brothers were bakers who founded a successful flour business, becoming quite wealthy in the process. Young Isaac worked in the family business and shared his brothers' political interests in Jacksonian democracy, but increasingly turned his attention to religious questions. Confident that “it is not reasonable to suppose that [God] would implant in the soul such an ardent thirst for truth and not reveal it,” he deepened his spiritual search for the truth, examining the varied options 19th-century American had to offer, until finally finding his way into the Catholic Church - “the place,” as he put it, “where it is supposed among Protestants the least to exist."

Like Christian history’s most famous spiritual seeker, Saint Augustine, Hecker had examined the leading intellectual and religious currents of his time, paying intense attention to his own inner spiritual sensibility, before finally finding a permanent home in the Roman Catholic Church in 1844. In our contemporary idiom, Hecker was “spiritual but not religious” for much of the first 25 years of his life. The very personal story of his spiritual search, of his intense attention to his own inner spiritual sense, eloquently exemplifies the perennially human appeal of such seeking and certainly speaks to the spiritual longings of some in our own (admittedly more secular) society today. But what was most significant about Hecker the seeker was that he did not remain that way. For Hecker, searching was never an end in itself. The point of seeking was finding. Once the object was found, the search ended. Having found fulfillment in the Catholic Church, he never desired to look farther. Rather, he desired to devote his life to helping others – especially other seekers, such as he himself had been – to find the truth in the Catholic Church. Hecker’s enthusiasm for his new faith and his commitment to the Church would permeate all his subsequent activities – from his initial conversion experience as recorded in his Diary, through his active ministry as a priest and missionary preacher, to his final mature exposition in his last book, The Church and the Age (1887). 

 

Fundamental to Hecker's experience was his recognition of the indwelling Holy Spirit of God acting to call him out of himself and into the Church. Animated by an increasingly conscious appreciation of God’s Providence, Hecker opened himself to be guided by the Holy Spirit, whose presence and action he discerned in God’s care for him, and through that experience he recognized the grace to attach himself to the Roman Catholic Church for the rest of his life. Himself a product of the religious fragmentation of American society, but drawn by God’s providential grace to seek the light of truth and find it in the unity of the Catholic Church, he then committed himself completely to share what he had found with others similarly inspired to seek and to find - and to whom his story continues to speak. All his diverse pastoral and missionary efforts and accomplishments would remain rooted in his abiding trust in God’s presence and action in his own life and in the world in which he lived. Reflecting upon his experience many years later, Hecker wrote that he “not only became a most firm believer in the mysteries of the Christian religion, but a priest and a religious, hopes thus to die.”

 

That enthusiastic embrace of the Church led him to that active vocation as a priest and religious, giving his all to cooperate with God’s grace in serving God, the Church, and his contemporaries. "I believe," he wrote, "that providence calls me to an active life; further, that he calls me to America to convert a certain class of persons amongst whom I found myself before my own conversion … But to convince me that this work will not be mine, and that I shall be only the mean instrument for the accomplishment of His designs, He wills me to be deprived of all human means, so that I shall not attribute his glory to myself. Contrary to my first provisions, He has unmistakably shown me that it is by neither learning nor eloquence that he calls me to convert others but solely by His grace and power."

 

Formed by Providence through the crucible of contradictory experience into a thoroughly committed “man of the Church” (as New York's Edward Cardinal Egan once described him), he lived a consecrated life of priestly mission as a parish pastor, a preacher of missions, a public speaker lecturing to Catholic and non-Catholic audiences, an author and apologist, and the founder of a religious community, which, as a canonically approved clerical Society of Apostolic Life in the contemporary Church, continues his charism, in the words of its Constitution, “to be a dwelling place for the Holy Spirit and a prophetic instrument for His sanctifying action.” It was precisely his love of his newly found faith, explains the United States Catholic Catechism for Adults, “that led Isaac Hecker to dedicate his life to serving Christ and Catholic Americans.”

 

In his active ministry, Hecker focused on the Church’s perennially essential mission of evangelization, both within the Church and outward to the world – founding a congregation of priests whose ministry reflects his inspiration even today.  What he lacked in formal philosophical formation and theological precision was abundantly compensated for by his spiritual insight, docility to the Holy Spirit, and filial obedience to the divine authority of the Church. 

Like the 19th century’s most famous foreign observer and analyst of Jacksonian American society and institutions, the French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), Hecker appreciated the problem posed by the fundamentally fragmented character of American society with its fragile connections among individuals, and the dilemma of how to create a community capable of uniting individuals consistent with their freedoms. While enthusiastically supporting the Church’s full spiritual authority over its own members, he envisaged a social solution in which individuals, converted to Catholicism as the answer to their deepest human aspirations and thus opened to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in their lives, would be empowered, by combining true religion and democratic political institutions, to develop this consensually based society along Catholic lines. His was a thoroughly religious form of discourse, uniquely capable of addressing social and political concerns. Prescinding from direct politics, Hecker anticipated overcoming the adverse consequences of liberal individualism at a social level through personal conversion and the consequent outpouring of the Holy Spirit, a recovery of the communal possibilities of democracy through overcoming the fragmenting forces he found in Protestant individualism.

Whereas for Hecker’s famous contemporary Karl Marx (1818-1883), religion meant alienation and its survival in society showed the inadequacy of its purely political separation from the state, for Hecker in contrast Roman Catholicism was the providential fulfillment of the most authentic aspirations of human nature; and its power to transform society through the conversion of citizens more than compensated for the Church’s loss of political power thanks to its separation from the State.

Although he is listed as Paulist General Superior and parish pastor from 1858 through his death in 1888, the last period of Hecker’s life was dominated by physical illness and emotional suffering. Even then, Hecker was hardly inactive. He was directly involved in the design and construction of the present Saint Paul the Apostle parish church in New York City. He also continued to contribute to the Catholic World, the monthly Catholic journal he had founded in 1865. The Church and the Age, published the year before Hecker’s death, remains the most comprehensive summary of his most mature thought on the themes that had preoccupied him for most of his life. It offers Hecker’s mature insights on his lifelong faith in the simultaneously interior action of the Holy Spirit within the individual and the Holy Spirit’s exterior action in the authority of the Church. It also represents Hecker’s final and mature formulation of his core convictions about the Church and the contemporary world in general and in particular the vexing question of Church and State in the United States, Italy, and France (the latter two being the countries where Church-State relations were persistently neuralgic at the time and where such issues had the most immediate impact on the government of the Universal Church).

Hecker was no systematic theologian and did not write as one. What he wrote was not some “theology” of the Holy Spirit but an appreciation of how the activity of the Holy Spirit is experienced in the Church and of the individual, ecclesial, and social effects which flow from openness to that divine activity in the world. Here Hecker effectively posited three renewals: that of the age (the world, society), dependent on that of religion (the Church), itself inseparable from that of the individual. ”Through the Church and its sacraments and its worship, “the object of Christ in the church is,” wrote Hecker in his later years, “to come in personal contact with the soul, and by the power of his grace to wash away its sins, communicate to it fellowship with God as the heavenly Father, and thereby to sanctify it.” 

Especially in his final years when burdened by illness, Hecker lived what one of his favorite spiritual authors, Jean-Pierre de Caussade, called “the sacrament of the present moment.” Caussade had written: “To be satisfied with the present moment is to relish and adore the divine will moving through all we have to do and suffer as events crowd in upon us.”

 

Through it all, Hecker lived a life of recognizable holiness. His reputation for sanctity was evident in his own lifetime and has continued to inspire pastoral and missionary zeal in the Church down to today. A decade after his death, the great Cardinal Gibbons wrote:

"He was undoubtedly a providential agent for the spread of the Catholic faith in our country, and did immense good by drawing non-Catholics nearer to us, allaying prejudice, obtaining a fair hearing for our holy religion, besides directly and indirectly making a multitude of converts. His spirit was that of a faithful child of Holy Church, every way Catholic in the fullest meaning of the term, and his life adorned with fruits of personal piety, but especially he was inspired with a zeal for souls of the true Apostolic order, aggressive and yet prudent, attracting Protestants and yet entirely orthodox."

Summarizing Hecker’s legacy, one of his 20th-century successors as Superior General of the Paulist Fathers, Joseph McSorley, wrote that Hecker manifested “a magnetic power commonly associated with personal holiness.”

In his life as a Catholic convert and a priest, Isaac Hecker practiced the theological and moral virtues to an heroic degree, confident that he was “living and working in the dawn of light of an approaching, brighter, more glorious future for God’s Holy Church.”

On May 23, 2006, the Paulist Fathers General Assembly, “conscious of the need for contemporary models of holiness,” resolved to promote the canonization cause of Paulist Founder, Father Isaac Hecker, declaring his life and teaching “truly a valuable resource that needs to be widely recognized and communicated,” that he “can inspire others beyond ourselves towards holiness of life, heroic virtue and personal faithfulness to Christ,” and that “the time has come” for Father Hecker’s story “to be disseminated throughout the larger church.”

Independence Day

Today, the U.S. celebrates 245 years of its independence.  Still a relatively young nation, the U.S. has long projected itself first as a, then as the major world power, with a particularly powerful and attractive narrative that once appealed to people to come here from all over the world, among them my own grandparents.

As John Adams famously wrote, Independence Day "ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more." Sadly, I suspect that far too few "solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty" will mark this holiday. (The U.S. edition of the Roman Missal does provide a proper Mass for Independence Day, which I will celebrate tomorrow). How easy it has become for Americans to forget the necessary prerequisites for a moral community and, in the U.S. case, how that ultimate expression of American exceptionalism, "a city on a hill," has an explicitly Christian origin and makes sense only in that context. In applying that New Testament image to the Puritan colony in New England in 1630, John Winthrop challenged settlers in this new land:

"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, gentleness, patience 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. The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as His own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of His wisdom, power, goodness and truth, than formerly we have been acquainted with. We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, “may the Lord make it like that of New England.” For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God’s sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going." 

No wonder, signer of the Declaration of Independence (and third President of Princeton) John Witherspoon said that one "is the best friend to American liberty who is most sincere and active in promoting true and undefiled religion.”

That said, we can in any case certainly expect the rest of Adams' proposed festivities in glorious abundance as we celebrate today not only our historical independence from the British Empire but our present independence from the covid pandemic and more than a year of personal and social restrictions. The desire to celebrate today is understandably almost universal.

Less frequently quoted is the continuation of what Adams wrote. "You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.”

As Adams well understood, it would take lots of "Toil and Blood and Treasure" for his small minority of American colonists (certainly less than half, maybe merely a third) to impose their will on both their fellow colonists (not to mention on the Native and African Americans they were sharing the space with) and on the mighty British Empire, well on its way by then to being the world's greatest naval power and at that time (after the French and Indian War) also the preeminent land power in North America. Adams also understood, as his collaborators in the subsequent and equally challenging task of forming an actual nation from 13 fractious former colonies (and then actually governing it) did, what "Toil and Blood and Treasure" it would take to create and maintain vibrant and stable political institutions that could endure the multiple stresses of the next two centuries and more.

We who are the beneficiaries of all that "Toil and Blood and Treasure" - most of us descendants of subsequent migrations of immigrants or else immigrants ourselves - must also understand the challenges involved in maintaining a stable and successful society in this very changed world. As the current "infrastructure" debate has highlighted and so many commentators in recent years have lamented, this country that once led the world in innovation and landed the first man on the moon is increasingly incapable of accomplishing much of anything or even trying - a dangerous state of affairs indeed as we face the full force of climate change, which is challenging us to change our ways right now. Additionally, the solidifying of our cultural divisions and political polarization, the increasing and rapid deterioration of democratic and constitutional norms among so many of our fellow citizens, and the increasing and rapid abandonment by one of our political parties of previous presumptions about democracy and constitutionalism, highlight how precarious our situation has become, how imperiled the national project Adams and his collaborators set in motion 245 years ago. 

In the musical Hamilton, King George III presciently foresees the fundamental challenges facing the new country and warns "they will tear each other into pieces."

Thanks to our cultural conflicts, political polarization, and social separation into mutually antagonistic communities no longer ready to recognize one another as fellow citizens with a common purpose, we are today, to paraphrase Lincoln, engaged in a cultural, political, and social civil war, testing whether this nation, so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.

Let us pray that it does. Let us pray that we will rediscover the challenges of citizenship that energized previous generations of Americans, while there is still time.

Mid-Year Woes and Hopes

In the traditional Western (i.e., Christian) calendar, a week ago was "Midsummer Day" (midway between May Day and Lammas Day), which was also, in effect, the mid-year day (midway between last Christmas and next Christmas). Our civil calendar (for curious reasons connected with the terms of ancient Roman consuls) runs one week later. So today, July 1, is midway between the last New Year's Day and the next New Year's Day. So where are we today, with the first half of this unhappy year behind us?

When the year began, the covid pandemic was still our primary reality. Hope had appeared on the horizon in the form of vaccines, but those vaccines were still virtually inaccessible to most people. For me personally, the pandemic had put me into quarantine over the New Year. So, what was originally supposed to be my last day doing the work I loved - before my descent into the soulless state of retirement - was instead involuntarily wrenched from me by covid's casual creep into my home. Fortunately spared infection myself, I then had to endure the further risk of infection by having to travel to my new home in New York, where I was then subjected to a second quarantine. (Thank God for Netflix!) Then, seemingly just as suddenly, the possibility of a saner future opened up in the form of access to the life-saving vaccine; and, by the beginning of March, everything (or, at least, many things) started to change.

That, of course, represents a narrow self-referential view of how this year began. But the public stage was comparably tumultuous. Our public space was shared somehow by the dangerously bad (January 6, and mask and vaccine resistance) and the encouragingly good (January 20, and widespread vaccine access). As the pandemic went from seemingly inexorable spread to the possibility of containment, our politics progressed from lies, cruelty, and unprecedented incompetence to our new president's conventional moral decency and normal governance. Even so, sadly, the pandemic remains a real threat in much of our country and most of the world, while the political cult of cruelty and hatred, hopefully exorcised by the 2020 election but actually kept alive by lies, remains a real force fully engaged in undermining our present and future prospects for constitutional governance and a more humane society.

Meanwhile, as if all that weren't enough, we find ourselves in one of those appalling summer heatwaves that remind us that climate change is not only really happening but is already here and now. In the northwest, where once summers were much milder than our local annual northeastern ordeal, the temperature has risen to unprecedented heights, while the rest of the west in general continues to experience unprecedented drought. How long before heat and drought combine to make significant sections of our country completely unlivable?

Yet, in spite of all this horror that increasingly surrounds us - so much of it our own fault - the second half of the year is beginning on an exhilarating note as more and more of the vitality of urban life returns, and with it a revived hope in the future's possibilities. Having crossed the rubicon of lunch with a friend in Manhattan a week ago, today I plan to go to a movie - my first trip to a movie theater anywhere in some 16 months! 

On one level, that may sound as self-referential as the whining of elite narcissists who, having spent the past year in a state of casual dress and are now traumatized by the prospect of dressing properly again - a level of self-absorption that must seem absurd to most people who still did have to show up in real life on at least some level even during the pandemic. On the other hand, every return to normal human activity and conventional standards of behavior, however modest and merely individual, is one more step back to social civility and should be celebrated for the significant step it is.