A Gentler American Christendom?

In December 1831, having reflected on the U.S. constitution and The Federalist Papers, French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), then in the course of his momentous visit to America, observed that “only a very enlightened people could have created the federal constitution of the United States, and that only a very enlightened people singularly accustomed to representative forms is capable of operating such a complicated machine and of maintaining within their separates spheres the various powers, which otherwise would not fail to clash violently with one another.”

Tocqueville was not alone in stipulating the pre-requisite political culture presumed to be required for a particular political system such as that of the U.S. to perdure. Thus, John Adams famously wrote: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other" (To the Massachusetts Militia, October 11, 1798).

Tocqueville's particular contribution involved assessing the viability of a modern liberal polity characterized by a lack of a historical pre-liberal alternative. The traditional pre-liberal alternatives included monarchical and aristocratic arrangements, but also other cultural components, most notably some version of union of throne and altar, whether as actual empirical reality or an idealized integralist aspiration.

Tocqueville saw in the U.S. an alternative to all of that. Hence his fascination with religion's role in 19th-century American democracy and especially (for obvious personal reasons as a French Catholic aristocrat) the surprising compatibility of Roman Catholicism with American democracy, a recognizable reality in place well before the official Catholic magisterial rapprochement with modern democratic pluralism in the mid-20th-century.

Tocqueville appreciated the problem posed by the fundamentally fragmented character of modern society with its fragile connections among individuals, and the dilemma of how to create a community capable of uniting individuals consistent with a regime of liberty. In 19th-century Europe, the Catholic Church was struggling to survive as an institution against an increasingly liberal political order that sought to constrain it.  In surviving liberalisms's assaults, the 19th-century Church sought to counteract the social fragmentation associated with liberalism and to reconnect increasingly isolated individuals into a community by preserving, repairing, or restoring religious bonds. Accordingly, in Democracy in America, Tocqueville recognized “that the Catholic religion has erroneously been looked upon as the natural enemy of democracy,” but he observed that , while American Catholics were "faithful to the observances of their religion," they nevertheless constituted "the most republican and the most democratic class of citizens which exists in the United States."

However counterintuitive that then seemed on both side of the Atlantic, it became one of the major projects of a certain development of 20th-century Catholic political philosophy to make something like that American accomplishment normative for the new post-Christendom era in which we now find ourselves. One of the preeminent architects of this project was the French Catholic convert and Thomistic philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), who without actually disowning the "sacral society" associated with the Catholic Middle Ages, attempted to express a completely new relationship between religion and modern, democratic, pluralistic, post-confessional societies.

What Maritain attempted to mainstream in 20th-century Catholic political philosophy could be called "A Gentler Christendom." That is the title of a recent First Things essay (originally delivered as a lecture for the Morningside Institute) by conservative Catholic author and NY Times columnist Ross Douthat, who argues that Maritain "was essentially describing something like the mid-century American model of church-state relations, of Christian politics playing out in a pluralist society, albeit reimagined in his argument for a society with a Catholic majority rather than a Protestant one." Douthat sees Maritain's model "in the role that Protestant churches, eventually joined by the Catholic Church, had played in the United States for generations." In this model, Douthat suggests, "the state could disentangle itself from the church without disentangling Christianity from politics, without undermining Christian faith, without even abandoning the ideal of Christendom itself."

I think Douthat's description does justice to what Maritain was doing, while also recognizing how Maritain's "optimism was timebound and ill-fated." Yet, contrary to contemporary integralist interpretations, Douthat defends the long-term viability of aspects of Maritain's model. Thus, he argues against the more integralist claim that it has been primarily secular (and anti-Christian) state power that has driven "American Christianity's retreat." Instead he highlights later internal Christian divisions, the "failure to respond effectively to social and economic and technological changes," and "theological civil wars and failures of leadership." He points out how the justly famed American Catholic subcultural infrastructure had flourished during earlier period of anti-Catholic opposition only to collapse a century later "because of terrible internal divisions over how to adapt, or not, to the social trends and changes of the era," as well as the triumph of "therapeutic forms of spirituality," and he juxtaposes all that with the even more dramatic collapse of pre-pluralist, more traditionally integralist models in Quebec, Spain, and Ireland. 

The empirical evidence, for Douthat, rather "suggests the moral and spiritual advantages of putting limits on faith's temporal ambitions, and trying to wield power within pluralism rather than over and against it." He concludes "religious power wielded too much against pluralism, with political ambition substituting for real faithfulness, will corrupt and enervate and bring about its own reward."

Presumably representing an integralist alternative to Douthat's Maritain-modelled "Gentler Christendom," Edmund Waldstein highlights how "secularism has always opposed Christianity in the name of freedom," and that the Enlightenment turned "the spirit fo Christian reform" against Christianity. He suggests that Maritain's "less subtle followers" may have conceded "that the church had been the enemy of human freedom, and secular Enlightenment its tru defender." His alternative model is how he interprets the Church's 16th-century Counter-Reformation strategy "not to water down Catholicism, but to radicalize it, to draw more deeply from the sources of tradition to invigorate the present." 

In response to Waldstein, Douthat agrees on "restoring a thick and rigorous internal culture for the faith, after so much thoughtless iconoclasm, moral laxity, and bland cultural conformity." But he questions Waldstein's assumption that that calls for a full integralist political theology that "political life, too, must submit to God." Among other things, Douthat sees in this a misplacing of priorities. "The two immediate realities of the church in much of the world today are institutional crisis and numerical collapse," which suggests "that the church needs to figure out how to govern itself before it aspires to any other sort of governance, and hoe to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ more effectively before it imagines itself ruling a society it has reconverted."

Finally, he challenges integralism to answer "why its vision was ultimately abandoned by so many within the church itself." If, Douthat challenges integralism, those who ultimately dismantled integralism were "people who thought of themselves as faithful Catholics, and if this happened in different ways almost everywhere at once, then anyone who wishes to restore such a system needs a clear account of why Catholics themselves so universally rejected it." By way of illustration, he notes that Quebec and Ireland "in the first half of the twentieth century simply did not feel like shining examples of Christian freedom lived in obedience to truth."

He concludes "the record requires more than a few concessions to tolerance and mercy" and "requires a greater reckoning with why that form of Christendom was both defeated and abandoned and an account of why its revival would not bring the same unhappy destination round again."

As Tocqueville once told his colleagues in the French parliament: "believe me when I say that the real cause, the effective cause that deprives men of power, is this: that they have become unworthy of wielding it.”

It seems Tocqueville and his American religious contemporaries may have been on to something after all.

 

One Million Dead

From the onset of the pandemic until the end of my term as pastor on December 31, 2020, I wrote a daily email to my parishioners which frequently included updated statistics on the number of covid cases and deaths worldwide, in the U.S., and in Tennessee. Since then I haven't paid that much attention to those steadily rising statistics, but I could hardly not notice this past week when the U.S. pandemic death toll finally passed one million. "One million empty chairs around the family dinner table," President Biden said in a video message marking this tragic milestone. "Each irreplaceable, irreplaceable losses. Each leaving behind a family or community forever changed because of this pandemic." The President has even ordered U.S. flags flown at half-staff this weekend in recognition of our collective national loss.

And loss it is. Not just the one million tragically dead, but the millions who survive them, who have tragically lost parents, spouses, siblings, caregivers, friends, colleagues. And then the are all those who were sickened with the virus, some extremely severely at the time, and many still afflicted with the mysterious mix of symptoms we casually call 'long covid." so, yes, indeed, there is plenty to mourn this weekend.

Back in March 2020, Dr. Deborah Birx, the new White House coronavirus response coordinator projected as many as 200,000 covid deaths "if we do things almost perfectly." That seemed shockingly high at that time.

One obvious response to such a shocking prediction might have been to "do things almost perfectly." Presumably that would have meant a major investment in mass testing and mitigation measures (.e.g., masking). Well, we know how that went! 

The one thing we did do "almost perfectly" was the amazingly rapid, unprecedentedly rapid, development of effective vaccines. But then the same politicization of the pandemic that caused a casual attitude toward masking and social distancing, especially among certain populations and in certain parts of the country, took over and diminished the social benefit of such an amazing and unprecedentedly rapid scientific breakthrough. Thanks to irresponsible politicians, pundits, religious leaders, and others, vaccination rates did not rise as high as they should have, while a narcissistic "done with covid" mentality took over everywhere, even among many of the vaccinated - shedding masks prematurely as if the pandemic were gone for good.

The pandemic is not gone for good, although thankfully vaccines and new therapeutic drugs have radically diminished the likelihood of severe disease in most cases. Still, the virus's continuance in circulation increases the potential for new variants, some of which might prove less constrained by existing vaccines and therapeutic measures.

It seems as if we never learn from experience. 

Meanwhile, we haltingly mourn those we have lost and hope another new virus isn't lurking somewhere ready to exploit our unpreparedness to "do things almost perfectly."

 

Another Trump-Biden Book

 

Historically, one-term presidents who have been defeated for re-election and lost control of Congress to the other party have not been popular party favorites. In this as in so many other things, Donald Trump has proved to be an exception retaining almost total control of the Republican party more than two hears into his post-presidency (or possible pre-presidency if he runs again and is re-elected in 2024). That alone is enough to explain the continued fascination with Trump as candidate and president, and the quantity (and high quality) of books about Trump and what we may well call this Trump-era in American politics.

The latest such effort is This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future (Simon and Schuster, 2022), by New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, which was the talk of the town (that is, DC) and of the more politically oriented mainstream media in the run up to its publication earlier this month.

The book dramatically retells the now increasingly familiar story of the catastrophic final year of the dysfunctional Trump Administration and the halting and increasingly ineffective first year of the Biden Administration. Martin and Burns highlight how our problematic political system was devastatingly challenged by the coronavirus pandemic and the January 6 Trumpist insurrection, and Biden's thus far minimally successful supposed return to political normalcy. 

By the authors' own account, they initially "envisioned a richly reported account of what was sure to be a memorable presidential campaign" - which they have given - but as they "lived through and covered the events of 2020, the extraordinary aftermath of the election and the tumultuous months since, it became clear" to them that this "crisis in American politics, in the years 2020 and 2021, deserved something more." So they crafted "a work of history—to capture the campaign yet also the equally important story of how the election and its violent conclusion shaped this country and its two political parties."

To the Ends of the Earth

 

History, as Pope Saint John XXIII is supposed to have said, is the greatest of teachers. Thus, it is no accident that the bulk of the Bible – both Old and New Testaments – is history of one sort or other. And thus it is also that every day of these seven weeks we call the Easter season the Church reads from the New Testament book called the Acts of the Apostles, actually the second volume of Luke’s Gospel, his continuation of the story of Jesus in the history of the Church.

 

Acts tells the amazing story of the Church’s growth, of the gradual but definitive expansion of its membership and the widening of its mission as the Good News spread – first in Jerusalem, then through Judea, then into Samaria, and eventually into the Greek-speaking, pagan world of the Roman Empire. All this took place, not by happenstance, but as part of God’s long-term providential plan – as Saint Paul makes clear quoting Isaiah in today’s 1st reading: I have made you a light to the Gentiles, that you may be an instrument of salvation to the ends of the earth.

We get some sense of what that is supposed to mean from the Book of Revelation’s inspired vision of the heavenly liturgy, with its great multitude which no one could count, from every nation, race, people, and tongue. But how do we get from here to there? Getting from here to there – that’s the mission of the Church and the history of the Church, modeled for us in the Acts of the Apostles.

It’s called the Acts of the Apostles, but it is Paul who eventually emerges as one of (if not the) central figures in the history of the Church’s growth and expansion - perhaps because Paul was bi-cultural and bi-lingual, a Jew from a Greek city (and a Roman citizen besides). Such human and cultural considerations are always important, always have an impact on how effectively the Church fulfils its mission.

Most important, of course, Paul’s conversion to Christ was so complete that it compelled him to share Christ with everyone. Paul recognized in the Risen Lord, who had appeared to him, the fulfillment of God’s promise to Israel and God’s plan to include all people in that promise. Ultimately it was Christ who counted, and Paul saw no conflict between being a Gentile and faith in Jesus – thus making it possible for the Gospel to become Good News for all.

The world has changed a lot since Paul’s time, but the Church’s mission hasn’t. There is always a natural temptation to turn inward, to become a cozy community, caring a lot about ourselves, concerned with who we are and what we have. As a Church, we have been doing a lot of that lately. Indeed, ever since the 1960s we have been doing lots of that. It is certainly arguable that the Church may be less effective in her pastoral ministry and her missionary outreach to the wider world than might otherwise be the case, whenever more energy is directed to internal battles between and among factions and interest groups within the Church. But the mission of the Church, our literally quite Catholic mission, remains that of the Good Shepherd, whose voice in the world we now are – we, who have been commanded, as Paul was, to be an instrument of salvation to the ends of the earth.

On this annual World Day of Prayer for Vocations, we are also reminded of what we might call the “personnel needs” of the Church for it to fulfill its mission of making the Good Shepherd’s voice heard in today’s world. The wonderful story Acts tells of the growth and expansion of the Church needed people like Paul and Barnabas to respond to the Risen Christ’s invitation to full-time involvement in the mission – even at the risk, as Acts acknowledges, that such a life might put one at odds with prevailing cultural and societal trends.

All the more reason, therefore, why it is so necessary for all of us to be always ready to respond filled with joy and the Holy Spirit to the challenge of God’s call – whatever in particular it may be in our individual lives – and ever on the alert to identify, encourage, and support some future Paul or Barnabas, who may be right here in our community today and whose energy and commitment will be needed if the Good Shepherd’s voice is to continue to be heard in our world.

Homily for the 4th Sunday of Easter, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, NY, May 8, 2022.

 

Making Sense of the Endless Easter Season

 

Sometime back in the 1980s, one of my seminary classmates ventured the opinion that the Easter season, as we now have it, is simply too long and should be confined to one week (in other words, to the existing Easter Octave). His argument, if I recall it correctly, was that it was just too difficult to sustain so much enthusiasm for seven long weeks. Certainly, in our contemporary world of radically reduced attention spans combined with our current addiction to celebration by anticipation (e.g., the way we celebrate Christmas before December 25 rather than starting on December 25), it seems our current seven-week Easter season is problematic. (In this discussion, I am, of course, completely prescinding from the obvious fact that, for many people, probably none of this matters at all. In a modern secular world, where religion itself, let alone liturgy, barely impinges upon the ordinary routines of life, whether it is Easter Time or, say, Advent, may matter much less than religious professionals would like to imagine.)

In any case, our current seven-week Easter season is itself a relatively recent construct, dating back only to Pope Saint Paul VI's 1969 calendar reform. "The fifty days from theSunday of the Resurrection to Pentecost Sunday are celebrated in joy and exultation as one feast day, indeed as one 'great Sunday'" (Universal Norms on the Liturgical Year and the Calendar, 22). This post-conciliar Easter season certainly recognizes some diversity within it - the Octave of Easter, Ascension Day, and the nine "weekdays from the Ascension up to and including the Saturday before Pentecost." But the prevailing tendency of the reformed calendar (evident even more so perhaps in its treatment of Lent) was to flatten such internal seasonal diversity in favor of a unified, somewhat monochromatic conception of the season as a whole.

Thus, for example, one of the most commented upon features of the contemporary version of the Easter season is the replacement of the traditional collects of the (themselves renamed) Sundays between Easter and Pentecost. The traditional collect for "Low Sunday" famously spoke of having completed the paschal festivities (paschalia festa peregimus), while those of the subsequent Sundays said nothing specific about Easter at all. This was seen as a serious problem by the liturgical bureaucrats charged with revising the Missal, and those collects have all accordingly been replaced - perhaps the best evidence of the intention to establish a uniformity in the Easter season over the seven-week period.

Of course, the old Paschaltide (like the current Easter season) had certain distinctive features that perdured uniformly throughout the entire time, notably the numerous alleluias, the Regina Caeli, and the Vidi Aquam. But, then as now, apart from the octaves, an ordinary saint's day took precedence over a ferial day. (In practice the ferial Mass was seldom celebrated anyway, yielding as in most of the rest of the year to the then much more popular Requiem Mass.)

That said, the current Easter season's predecessor seemed to take a more realistic, less uniform approach to sustaining prolonged celebration. Thus, the pre-conciliar Paschaltide, which ran from the beginning of the Mass of the Easter Vigil to None of the Saturday within the Octave of Pentecost, was explicitly defined to include a distinct season of Easter, a season of Ascension, and the Pentecost Octave. The difference between the Easter and Ascension seasons within Paschaltide was dramatized best by the requirement that the Paschal Candle, a symbol of the uniquely paschal presence of the Risen Christ, be solemnly extinguished after the Gospel at the Mass on Ascension Thursday and then removed from the sanctuary. Nowadays, of course, the paschal candle keeps reappearing all year (at baptisms and funerals, for example, and in many places where the baptistery is not really separate from the main body of the church it remain visible all year long). So the fact that it remains an extra 10 days after the Ascension may not seem so counter-symbolic as it obviously is. (Then again, I once witnessed the Paschal Candle ceremonially extinguished after the Gospel on Pentecost, an even more symbolically confusing conflation of old and new. Hopefully, no one went home imagining that it was the Pentecostal tongues of fire that were being extinguished!)

In addition to the major variations already mentioned, the traditional Paschaltide also included the "Lesser Litanies," that is, the three Rogation Days" on the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday before the Ascension. (In Milan, they were more logically celebrated on the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday after the Ascension.) And the Octave of Pentecost included the summer Ember Days, somewhat contradicting the ancient notion that there should be no fasting during the Easter season.

But, other than celebration fatigue and the shortened attention span problem already alluded to, perhaps the difficulty resides not so much in the desire to sustain celebration for too long a time as in the flattening of that same time by the downgrading of Ascension and Pentecost. Along with Christmas and Epiphany, the feasts of Easter, Ascension, and Pentecost are the five principal festivals of the liturgical calendar, still distinguished as such in the Roman Canon and previously distinguished by Octaves. There is a certain logic to dividing "the  50 days" into an Easter 40 and an Ascension 10, not least in order to correspond with some fidelity to the biblical account. The modest reference in the present arrangement to the weekdays between Ascension and Pentecost as ever so slightly set apart from the rest of the season represents a minimalistic vestige of that division. In the absence of an Ascension octave, treating Ascension Thursday (obviously always on Thursday) as the end of the specifically Easter season, followed by a nine-day period of preparation for Pentecost would be one way of making sense of the season.

That still leaves the problem of Pentecost and its now lost octave. Whether due to the reformers' apparent antipathy to octaves in general and to an overly literal obsession with the number 50, the destruction of the Pentecost octave can only be seen as a (presumably irreparable) loss. According to the familiar story, when Pope Paul VI went to vest for Mass on the day after Pentecost in 1970,  and found green vestments laid out for him, he asked "Where are the red vestments?” He was told that the Octave of Pentecost had been abolished. “Who did that?” he supposedly asked, only to be told “Your Holiness, you did.” And so the story concludes, the pope wept. Whether true or apocryphal, the story does express the damage done to the liturgy by the gratuitous abolition of the Pentecost Octave. More recently, Pope Francis has made a small gesture to correcting that mistake by instituting the Memorial of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church, to be celebrated always on the Monday after Pentecost.

Restoring a sense of Easter not as a uniformly flat time but as a season with several (specifically three) peak moments might help to retrieve Ascension and Pentecost as feasts truly celebrating the beginning of the Church's current life.

Meanwhile, on the ground in the real world of contemporary American religion, the peak moments of the otherwise flattened Easter season will continue to be First Communions, Confirmations, Graduations, maybe May Crownings, and the biggest American pseudo-religious commercial feast of all, Mother's Day.

(Photo: Easter 1963, St. Nicholas of Tolentine Church, Bronx, NY)