The Moral Power of Institutional Commitments

Recuperating from a morning medical test, I am treating myself to an afternoon with the House January 6 Committee's televised hearing. The focus today has been on the Trump campaign's unconscionable attempt to illegally influence the election's outcome at the state level - notably in Arizona and Georgia. The witnesses called to testify today have been elected state officials in Arizona and Georgia and an election worker in Georgia who experienced threats and harassment for merely doing her job.

What does it say that the "heroes" who helped save the country from Trump's effort to secure for himself and illegal second term were, for the most part, politicians and ordinary people who were just doing their jobs? In recent days, there has been an inordinate amount of debate about how to evaluate former Vice President Pence's behavior, about whether his merely fulfilling his constitutional duty somehow counts as heroism. Of course, anytime anyone's life is threatened to intimidate him to violate his constitutional responsibilities and/or to punish him for having done his duty, the official in question can be said to have displayed some degree of courage. Most of us have likely never been in such a position. So it ill behooves us from a position of safety to denigrate the real courage it can take merely to do one's job and fulfill one's duty in the face of threats and intimidation. In that sense, certainly, Vice President Pence acted courageously - even more obviously so in his insistence on remaining in the Capitol throughout that dangerous day. An analogy might be a certain 3rd-century anti-pope who ended up a martyr, the latter experience compensating, so to speak, for his earlier errors.

That said, however, history cannot completely pass over the iniquities characteristic of Vice President Pence's behavior as a Trump-enabler during the 2016 and 2020 campaigns and during his term as Vice President. Pence proved to be a consistently loyal enabler of Trump's tragic presidency. Recognized for his right-wing religious self-righteousness, Pence was perhaps a primary actor in facilitating the acceptance of Trump and Trump's behavior among the Republican party's supposedly religious, Christian evangelical elements prior to and during Trump's ill-fated presidency. If, on January 6, Trump erroneously expected Pence to put loyalty to him above anything else, perhaps he had reason to have such hope based on Pence's slavish servitude to Trump until that point. One easily gets the impression that Pence might have preferred to escape having to decide what to do and only acted publicly when he had no choice. Obviously, that is not completely contemptible. One could perhaps say something similar of Saint Thomas More, who avoided publicly opposing Henry VIII until the King left him with no other choice. 

What such cases actually suggest, however, is that, while the individual's personal commitment and courage were essential to the outcome, what facilitated that was an underlying institutional commitment. Because of that commitment, Pence did what he knew to be the only thing the constitution actually allowed him to do - once he found himself with no other options. In spite of years of servile subservience to Trump, Pence suddenly found himself in an unavoidable situation in which he had no choice but to act, in which case his institutional loyalty and commitment won out.

Obviously, this whole sorry story highlights the importance of having people in such positions who take their institutional commitments seriously. But it also highlights the importance of first having such institutions - institutions important and powerful enough in our political and moral imagination to compel our loyalty to them to take precedence over alternative courses of action. Ordinary people aspiring to moral virtue require a clear conception of what moral virtue commits them to.

Central to such a political and moral American imagination is institutional commitment to the constitutionally constructed responsibilities of one's office and to a constitutional political culture which valorizes the priority of legal elections and the peaceful transfer of power, recognized as such by winners and losers alike. Allow that to be weakened, and we weaken as well the very framework within which individual officeholders and citizens are able to recognize a duty to resist any kind of coup.

Corpus Christi

The popular custom probably most widely associated with the celebration of Corpus Christi is the procession in which the Blessed Sacrament is carried in a monstrance through the local streets with great solemnity and communal festivity. The procession is a public witness of the Church’s belief in and popular devotion to the sacrament of the Eucharist. Beginning with Saint John Paul II and continuing until the pandemic shut it down along with so much else, recent popes have revived the custom at the papal level, celebrating Mass at the Papal Basilica of St. John Lateran (Rome’s Cathedral), and then going from there in procession with the Blessed Sacrament up the Esquiline Hill to the Papal Basilica of St. Mary Major, where the procession concludes with Benediction outdoors.

As a seminarian in 1984, I was fortunate to attend a particularly impressive Corpus Christi procession in Montreal, Quebec, where we followed the Blessed Sacrament through the narrow streets of the Old City to the historic basilica of Notre Dame. But perhaps the most impressive, certainly the most moving outdoor eucharistic procession I’ve ever attended was actually not on Corpus Christi but the one that takes place every summer afternoon at the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes in southern France. After being exposed all day under a tent, the Blessed Sacrament is carried at the end of a procession of sick pilgrims and their caregivers to the massive underground basilica. Empty, the basilica (the only structure large enough to contain the vast number of pilgrims present on any given day) resembles an ugly underground parking lot. Crowded to capacity for afternoon Benediction, however, the experience is – as my British friends would say – “brilliant.”

A more traditional word might be ”awesome” – a word which really used to mean something before it became a contemporary synonym for “nice.” Thus, the Mass for the Consecration of a Church used to start with the words of the Patriarch Jacob in Genesis: How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven; and it shall be called the court of God [Genesis 28:17].

We build and decorate churches (with a small “c’) to be “awesome,” so that “awesome” things can happen there - so that the community of faithful which we call the Church (with a capital “C”), can assemble to pray, to hear God’s word, and to celebrate the sacraments, especially the Eucharist in which Christ is present in a unique way in his Body and Blood. Prefigured by the bread and wine offered (as we just heard) by the priest-king Melchizedek [Genesis 14:18-20], the Eucharist was established as a sacrament (as we also just heard) by Christ at the Last Supper [1 Corinthians 11:23-26], and now is celebrated daily on our altars and  permanently reserved for adoration in our Tabernacles. Today’s celebration is meant to highlight all of that, all the while inviting us to a deeper devotion to and appreciation of Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist and its transformative effects in our lives.

But, if the Eucharist is one of the Risen Christ’s great gifts to his Church, its transformation effect is also a challenge. The four short verses we just heard from Paul’s 1st letter to the Corinthians are part of a longer text which highlights the Corinthians’ conflicts, divisions, and factions – in other words, their resistance to being changed by the very Eucharist that they were privileged to experience together.

We hear a lot in the news about the conflicts, divisions, and factions in our society and we can certainly see and experience the consequences all around us. Well back then, among those to whom Saint Paul’s account of the Last Supper was originally addressed, all was not well either, even among themselves. It seems that the values of secular Roman society, with its social and class distinctions and inequalities, were making themselves felt even within the Church community, to the point that even the celebration of the Eucharist seemed to mirror those conflicts, divisions, and factions.

Perhaps the Corinthians couldn’t quite help bringing the world with them to Mass, any more than we can. It is always temptingly easy to miss the point and focus on the wrong food, as Pope Francis reminded us on Corpus Christi a couple of years ago, when he said: If we look around, we realize that there are so many offers of food which do not come from the Lord and which appear to be more satisfying. Some nourish themselves with money, others with success and vanity, others with power and pride. But the food that truly nourishes and satiates us is only that which the Lord gives us! The food the Lord offers us is different from other food, and perhaps it doesn’t seem as flavorful to us as certain other dishes the world offers us. So we dream of other dishes, like the Hebrews in the desert, who longed for the meat and onions they ate in Egypt, but forgot that they had eaten those meals at the table of slavery.

So, what about us? “Where do I want to eat? At which table do we want to be nourished? At the Lord’s table? Or do we dream of other flavorful foods? What do we recall? The Lord who saves me, or the garlic and onions of slavery? On this feast of Corpus Christi, when the Church in the United States is embarking on an official program of “Eucharistic Revival,” let us, as the Pope suggests, recover the right memory and learn to recognize the false bread that deceives and corrupts, because it comes from selfishness, from self-reliance and from sin.

In the traditional Corpus Christi procession, the Church ritually acts out the reality of Christ coming into our world and overcoming all our conflicts, divisions, and factions. In the Eucharist – and in the transformed life we share together as Christ’s Church united by and through the Eucharist we celebrate – Christ doesn’t just come to us. He remains with us, blessing the world where we and he walk together, nourishing our ordinary and sometimes somewhat messed up lives with the real, flesh-and-blood presence of God himself, who invites us – like the 5000+ people in the Gospel [Luke 9:11b-17] – to put aside our conflicts, divisions, and factions to eat until we have more than enough.

Homily for Corpus Christi, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, NY, June 19, 2022.

The Pope at War

 

Historian David Kertzer, already famous for his Pulitzer-prize-winning The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe (Random House, 2014), has now continued his account with the story of his successor, Pope Pius XII, The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler (2022), in which he makes use of the Vatican wartime archives, sealed since Pope Pius XII's death in 1058 and recently opened in 2020. Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (1876-1958) had served as Pius XI’s Secretary of State, even as the latter became more and more alarmed not just by Hitler's Nazi Germany but also by Mussolini's Fascist state in Italy, with which he had successfully negotiated the Lateran Treaty and Lateran Concordat in 1929. By the time of his death in 1939, Pius XI had become thoroughly disillusioned with Mussolini, who by then had become tightly allied with Hitler. Pacelli, elected to succeed him as Pius XII, was a lifelong diplomat who would prove much more cautious in dealing with both dictators.

Especially since Rolf Hochhuth's 1963 play The Deputy, but less publicly even while the war itself was still going on (as Kertzer demonstrates), there have been questions about and criticisms of Pius XII's diplomatic Neutrality and supposed "silence" the face of German aggression and war crimes, including but not limited to the Holocaust. The Pope at War presents a dramatic picture of what Pius did or did not do as Germany conquered most of Europe and the Nazis began their systematic mass murder of Jews and others. Whatever we choose to think of the Pope's (or anyone's) moral judgment and behavior during the war, the fact remains the Holocaust happened as a consequence of Germany's conquest of much of Europe, and the Holocaust ended the only way it could have ended, thanks to the Allies' overwhelming military victory and Germany's unconditional surrender. Sometimes some of Pius's critics sound as if Pius himself by sheer moral exhortation (and possibly by excommunicating both Hitler and Mussolini) could somehow have altered the history of the war. While all the evidence suggests that Pius XII never seriously considered excommunicating either Hitler or Mussolini, Kertzer believes that the Nazi leadership showed some concern he might. That said, I think it remains rather unlikely that such a move would have been any more successful than Pius V's infamous excommunication of England's Elizabeth I, which was a notorious failure.

One key component of the Pope's reserve, Kertzer suggests, was "the pope’s recognition that nearly half the citizens of the enlarged German Reich were Catholic, and millions of them were avid supporters of Hitler." He believes that Pius XII’s "silence" was motivated both by his "fears of the actions that the Axis powers might take against the church if he spoke out," but also "by his fears that denouncing the Nazis would alienate millions of Catholics and risk producing a schism in the church." Italy, on the other hand, may have been different. The ease with which the Italian fascist apparatus collapsed when the King finally removed Mussolini "shows how tenuous the Duce’s hold was on the Italian people in the end."

Indeed, Kertzer sees much of what went on through the filter of the Church's unique relationship with Italy. In fact, he considers the effort "to remember Pius XII as a heroic figure," as "part of a much broader effort to recast Italy’s uncomfortable Fascist past that goes well beyond the church."

That said, Pius's failure - if that is what it was - was not his failure to end the war or dramatically affect its outcome. His failure - if it was his failure - was what Kertzer calls a "moral failure." In the end the Pope proved successful at "protecting the institutional interests of the Roman Catholic Church at a time of war," and "the church came out of the war with all the privileges it had won under Fascism intact." These were, it ought to be recognized, real accomplishments. But, to achieve that outcome, "Pius XII clung firmly to his determination to do nothing to antagonize." However, Kertzer considers the Pope's policy to be a failure of moral leadership. and judges him a failure "precisely as a moral leader."

Thanks to his massive research, Kertzer present a very detailed account which allows the reader to evaluate the accomplishment and failures of the Pope's policies and the Holy See's wartime behavior in the context in which it occurred and how it was judged by people at the time. For that alone, his account is well worth reading. The ultimate challenge, however, is Kertzer's moral critique, which takes the issue beyond the realm of diplomacy and international politics and the art of the possible and moves it to a different standard suggested by the very nature of the Pope's unique office, which makes him - and our expectations of him - altogether different from a Roosevelt or a Churchill.

That very different standard and the expectations that accompany it remain perennially relevant, as reflected in the widespread reactions to Pope Francis' supposed reticence recently regarding Vladimir Putin.

Intellectual and political honesty requires dispassionate analysis of Pope Pius XII's behavior as a political actor with very limited and constrained options in a time of total war, which for a while looked as if it would end with total Nazi domination of Europe and then later led to the real possibility of Soviet communist domination of Europe. At the same time the moral question Kertzer raises requires a very different kind of analysis rooted in a radically religious understanding of the Pope's purpose - and the Church's - a purpose which cannot be confined to institutional survival and the effective exercise of diplomatic influence or political power, however valid and legitimate such considerations may sometimes seem.

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"Your Dishonor Will Live Forever"

I spent the golden summer of 1973, my first summer as a grad student, doing what grad students are supposed to do, reading roughly a book a day. But that otherwise relatively carefree summer saw the intrusion of the outside world in the form of the televised Watergate hearings which we all enthusiastically watched wherever we were on the Princeton campus. I thought back to that much more civil time last week when the January 6 Committee debuted its own hearings.

Fast-forward 49 years to the January 6 hearings, and the mood is quite different. Then we eagerly waited each new revelations which increasingly painted a picture of Republican party criminality. This time the criminality, which was much greater and infinitely more dangerous to the nation, has long been on display. The hearings will be less revelatory than confirmatory, less a testimony and more of an indictment. But, while the 1973 Senate Watergate Committee's televised hearings set the stage fro the dramatic undoing of a corrupt Administration, it is unlikely that the January 6 Committee can accomplish anything quite comparable - thanks to a combination of public indifference, decades of accumulated cynicism about government, and the catastrophic division of our country in which about half hear and know one version of the story and another half hear and believe an alternative version.

The post-Watergate mantra that kept emphasizing how "the system worked" was perhaps always a bit overly self-celebratory. But it was true in that our bizarre constitutional system did rise to the occasion - on that occasion. Today, however, we inhabit a different political universe, in which the system most manifestly does not work. The reason the two Republicans on the committee, Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney stand out so dramatically is that they are all alone. Unlike in 1973, when Republicans participated in the investigative process, when Republicans in Congress still thought it was their responsibility to serve their country and not just their Dear Leader, there is little expectation that these hearings can alter the balance of political power in either Washington or the country as a whole. Hence the particularly poignant character of Lix Cheney's courageous warning to her fellow Republicans: "Your dishonor will live forever."

3 in 1

Tomorrow is Trinity Sunday, a feast which first appeared in the Western Church toward the end of the first millennium, which has been celebrated in the entire Latin Rite calendar since about 1334.

According to a famous legend, Saint Patrick is said to have used a shamrock to teach the doctrine of the Trinity when evangelizing 5th-century pagan Ireland. The fact that he resorted to using a shamrock illustrates the difficulty we generally have when talking about the Trinity. But perhaps the principal problem is not so much that the Trinity is a supernatural mystery, which we can never completely understand, but rather that it seems so abstract, more like a philosophical idea than an expression of religious experience.

 

All that is in spite of the obvious fact that our religious lives are all thoroughly permeated by the language of the Trinity. All of us were baptized in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. On that occasion, we – or our parents and godparents - all made a profession of faith in the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We begin every Mass and most of our prayers with the Sign of the Cross – in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. The Collect at Mass is addressed to the Father through the Son in the unity of the Holy Spirit. When we pray the psalms, we conclude each psalm with Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, and we do the same with each decade of the rosary. Our sins have been forgiven in confession, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. At weddings, rings are exchanged in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. We have all been blessed – and have blessed ourselves - in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. In short, both individually and as a Church community, we have been defined, formed, shaped by the awesome mystery of who God is, which defines the Triune God’s relationship with us and ours with God. If we seem sometimes to take the idea of the Trinity for granted, it may be because it seems to surround us all the time.

Our profession of faith in the Trinity, as Walter Kasper [The God of Jesus Christ, Continuum, 2012] has written, "is the Christian form of speaking about God, that at the same time claims to express the eschatologically definitive and universal truth about God from which alone all other talk about God can derive its full truthfulness. It is the objective and even objectively necessary and binding formulation of the eschatological revelation God has given of himself in Jesus Christ through the working of the Holy Spirit. ... The doctrine has its basis solely in the history of God's dealings with human beings and in the historical self-revelation of the Father through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit." 

 

On the one hand, the doctrine of the Trinity expresses our uniquely Christian insight into the inner life of God – where the Son is the image of the Father, the Father’s likeness and outward expression, who perfectly reflects his Father, while the Holy Spirit in turn expresses and reveals the mutual love of Father and Son. At the same time, the Trinity also expresses something fundamental about how God acts outside himself. In terms of our religious experience, it is how God acts that reveals who God is.

 

Already in the Old Testament, God was revealing himself as one whose nature is revealed in how he acts toward us: a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity. It was to such a God that Moses prayed – as we all pray – do come along in our company … and receive us as your own [Exodus 34:6, 8]. It is, of course, the Son, consubstantial with the Father, who, as the visible image of the invisible God, came into the world, so that the world might be saved through him [John 3:17]. Through him we have peace with God and have gained access by faith to this grace in which we stand [Romans 5:1-2]. Risen from the dead and seated at the right hand of the Father, the Son has sent the Holy Spirit upon his Church, which is the Body of Christ and the Temple of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit unites us with the Father in the Body of Christ, the Church. Through the sacraments, Christ continues to communicate the Holy Spirit to the members of his Church. The Holy Spirit is inseparable from the Father and the Son, in both the inner life of the Trinity and his gift of love for the world. The Holy Spirit’s presence in us enables us to experience the presence and action of God in our lives not as an abstraction but as a real relationship.

 

So it is no merely theoretical abstraction that God's grace is given to us from the Father, through the Son, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. As the famous 4th-century Bishop and Doctor of the Church, St. Athanasius, wrote in one of his letters: When we share in the Spirit, we possess the love of the Father, the grace of the Son, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit himself.