What Happened?

Thomas Dyja, in New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation (Simon and Schuster, 2021), called Rudy Giuliani "New York's version of Eliot Ness," with a "Jesuitical view of the world." He also said of him that he "had built his career on the belief that everyone was a sinner somehow - you just had to catch them at it." Giuliani's "Catholic righteousness," as Dyja characterized it, "made him look above politics. Which," he added, "was a very good thing when you wanted to enter politics."

The Giuliani myth went through several stages - the mob-fighting, anti-Wall Street U.S. Attorney, the anti-crime two-term mayor, and then the star of 9/11. Since then, of course, that myth has taken a different turn, as Giuliani and his image have cascaded downward in a dramatic decline. That is the topic and theme of CNN's new four-part series, Giuliani: What Happened to America's Mayor? which premiered yesterday and will conclude next Sunday.

Full disclosure, I have never been a fan of the Giuliani myth. I never fell for him any of the three times he ran for mayor. On the morning tragedy struck New York City on 9/11, I had just voted in a party primary for one of those competing to be his successor and, like many New Yorkers, was looking forward to the imminent advent of a new mayoral administration. By then, to quote Dyja again, "Rudy has united the city - everyone was eager to move past him." While the Mayor performed creditably on 9/11 (and benefited in the short-term from the many accolades that fell to him as a result), my turn-of-the-millennium perception of New York on the eve of 9/11 was of a racially divided and politically polarized city, whose mayor's over-sized combative personality's usefulness had long ago run its course. Indeed, had 9/11 not happened, the end of Giuliani's mayoral reign would likely have been remembered most for his marital soap-opera, which caused an acquaintance of mine at the time to ask (just one month before 9/11), "Why does anyone bother to write fiction?"

Mayor Giuliani's prominence in the 9/11 story, however, gave him a new lease on political life. How he failed to translate that into serious success and instead now finds himself in such a discredited situation today will, presumably, be the ultimate focus of the CNN series. While I think no one would have predicted in the aftermath of 9/11 the full depth of Giuliani's fall (just as no one would have then predicted Trump's presidency), there were perhaps some warning signs. For example, until one of the mayoral candidates courageously called his bluff, Giuliani tried to finagle a 90-day extension of his term and even appeared to be angling for a third term (something his successor eventually succeeded at getting for himself, albeit through proper channels). As the former Mayor, Ed Koch, already saw at the time, "He'd be a danger to the country if he were president."

The first episode traces Giuliani's 1980s rise as an outer-borough guy, resentful of Manhattan elites. (What other outer-borough guy resentful of Manhattan elites who also rose to prominence in New York in the 1980s does that sound like?) As a righteous, mob-fighting, Wall-Street fighting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District, Giuliani was both a personal and professional success and an embryonic populist hero. His first mayoral campaign came in 1989 (the year of the Central Park Five and Yusef Hawkins). He originally expected to run against incumbent Ed Koch, but ended up running against - and losing to - New York's first Black Mayor David Dinkins. The second episode focuses on his two terms as mayor (1994-2001) and the deepening racial division and polarization which increasingly characterized his regime. With the benefit of hindsight, the program highlights Trump-like characteristics Giuliani displayed.

Is Giuliani a "tragic" figure in a classical sense? If so, then he must be both accomplished a flawed. As U.S. Attorney for the Southern District and then as Mayor, he was both. The first two episodes do a good job of highlighting how talented and accomplished he was, but how his need to win would get the better of him.

Presumably, the disastrous denouement will come in the third and fourth episodes, set to air next Sunday.

We Three Kings

Those magic men the Magi

Some people call them wise

Or Oriental, even kings

Well anyway, those guys

They visited with Jesus

They sure enjoyed their stay

Then warned in a dream of King Herod's scheme

They went home by another way.

 

So begins James Taylor's 1988 song, Home By Another Way, about our friends, the Magi, who came from the east to do homage with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Almost 20 years ago, in 2005, when I was a parish priest here, I attended World Youth Day in Cologne, Germany, with the group from the parish. It was the newly elected Pope Benedict XVI's first World Youth Day. Cologne’s great Gothic Cathedral, which was the architectural model, by the way, for our own Saint Patrick’s Cathedral here in New York, was originally built to house the relics of the magi, which were supposedly brought to Cologne by Emperor Frederick Barbarosa in 1164. Thus, the theme for that World Youth Day was We have come to worship Him [Matthew 2:2], and one of our World Youth Day activities was to walk across the Hohenzollern bridge as pilgrims to visit the cathedral and venerate the magi. 

Here in the United States Epiphany now seems little more than a barely noticed, very vestigial postscript to Christmas. Historically, however, Epiphany is actually the oldest festival of the Christmas season. It is older than Christmas Day itself, and (noticed or not) it still ranks among the principal festivals of the Church’s calendar. In many more traditionally Catholic countries (Italy, Spain, Portugal, Latin America), it is the principal Christmas gift-giving day. In the Eastern Churches, Matthew’s story of the magi is read on Christmas Day, and Epiphany in the East is primarily a celebration of Jesus’ baptism, the beginning of his mission as an adult. Here in the West, we postpone the commemoration of Christ’s baptism until tomorrow, focusing today almost exclusively on the story of the magi.

That said, the fact is that we really know next to nothing about the magi. We do not know their names (though tradition has given them the familiar names Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar), nor their social status (though tradition, inspired by Psalm 72, has crowned them kings), nor even their number (though tradition, based on the gifts itemized in the Gospel, has counted them as three, which in time came to represent the three then-known continents - Africa, Asia, and Europe - and the three ages of human life – youth, maturity, and old age).

The Gospel tells us none of these things, but it does tell us what it is important for us to know about the magi.

First of all, it tells us that they were foreigners, Gentiles, pagans. As such, they represent the majority of the human race – past and present – in a world in which (as we just heard from the Prophet Isaiah) darkness covers the earth, and thick clouds cover the peoples. The pagan magi relied on natural knowledge, and so sought for God through his creation, hoping to find in the phenomena of nature (in their case, the movements of the heavenly bodies), some clues about God and God’s providential plans for the world.

Searching for God in the natural world he created may have been a good start. But the story also tells us that, whatever varied paths different people may start out on, our paths must all finally converge in Jesus, and that the interpretive key to the story of Jesus is God’s revelation of himself not only in nature but in history, in the history of Israel. So it was to the Jewish city Jerusalem, that the pagan magi came to learn the star’s full significance – as revealed in the scriptures, which translated the natural light of a star into the revelation of a person. As Isaiah prophesied: Nations shall walk by Jerusalem’s light, and kings by her shining radiance.

By way of warning, however, the story also illustrates how easily we may miss the point of it all. When Herod heard the Magi, he was greatly troubled and all Jerusalem with him. They were troubled, instead of being overjoyed like the Magi! What troubled them? What made such good news seem to them like bad news? The same Christmas star that filled the magi with hope somehow seemed like an evil portent to those who sensed the threatening challenge it posed to their power and priorities. What disposes some people even today to misplace their priorities such that they too react to the good news of the Gospel as if it were bad news?

And then there were the scholars whom Herod consulted. They correctly quoted scripture. But, for all their knowledge of the subject, they seemed to lack the knowledge they needed the most. This, none of them did the obvious thing, go to Bethlehem. Only the pagan magi did!

Talk about missing the opportunity of a lifetime!

The magi, on the other hand, were overjoyed, not troubled. The magi set out as true pilgrims – and on entering the house they saw the child with Mary his mother … prostrated themselves and did him homage. In the old liturgy when these words were read or sung in the Gospel on Epiphany, everyone was directed to genuflect. It was the liturgy’s dramatic way of physically bringing the point of the story home, helping us to identify personally with the pilgrim magi, experiencing what they experienced.

As for the magi, we never hear about them again. We know only what James Taylor chose as the title of his song, that they departed for their country by another way. Nativity scenes sometimes seem frozen in time. Everybody stays stationary – at least until it’s time to put the figures all back in the closet. But the real magi didn’t just stay there (any more than the shepherds did). They went back to wherever they had lived before, but in the magi’s case they departed for their country by another way. They went back to whatever they had been doing before, but they would never be the same again. And, thanks to Christ’s coming into our world, so must it be for us. We too must be different now from whatever we would otherwise have been.

Every January, with the holidays behind us, we return, as we all must, to our ordinary activities. Like the magi, however, our challenge is to travel through our ordinary life by another way, because something so special has happened that makes everything different from what it would otherwise have been. So, even as we navigate our way through an uncertain and challenging present, the Christmas star invites us to travel with the magi – to go on pilgrimage with them to Bethlehem and back again – confident that, whatever else may be the case, the Christmas star will precede us to illuminate every new day of this new year, and so will guide us on that alternate way, which, like the magi, we are, all of us together, being challenged to find and follow.

Homily for the Epiphany of the Lord, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, January 8, 2023.

Two Years On

 

Today is the second anniversary of the attempted coup of January 6, 2021, a date which (to borrow a familiar phrase from FDR) will live in infamy.

I do not pretend to have read in full the massive Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate January 6. I did, however, indulge in enough of a secular break from the 12 Days of Christmas and spent some time reading major parts of it (conveniently available in Kindle version). The Executive Summary, which lays out the fundamentals of the case, is probably sufficient  information for most people's purposes. Combine that with having watched some or all of the televised hearings, and the account becomes quite clear.

In those hearings and in the Committee's Report, the evidence points to "what ultimately became a multi-part plan to overturn the 2020 Presidential election" and leads "to an overriding and straight forward conclusion: the central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump, whom many others followed." Almost everything else in the hearings, the Report, and the supplementary documentation further amplifies this conclusion.

It is important to note, as the Committee did, that January 6 did not stand alone, but was the result of the promotion of the "Big Lie" about the election, which began on Election night itself. (Actually, Trump's election denialism goes all the way back to his campaign, indeed to his first campaign.) The Report provides detailed information about the various false claims that were made, the attempts to influence state officials, the fake electors' scheme, the attempts to get Vice President Pence to do what he himself understood he had no legal right to do, etc. The Report also highlights Trump's role in causing the rioters to come to Washington on January 6 and his infamous inaction for 187 minutes while the riot was going on. 

"It is helpful in understanding these facts to focus on specific moments in time when President Trump made corrupt, dishonest, and unlawful choices to pursue his plans."

Earlier on January 6, Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously referenced the feast of the Epiphany in her talk to the Democratic caucus. "Today, January 6, is the feast of the Epiphany," she repeated that evening. "On this day of revelation, let us pray that this instigation to violence will provide an epiphany for our country to heal."

If healing had been possible in the aftermath of the attempted coup, the opportunity was quickly missed.  The best course of action - if also the most courageous and hence least likely - might have been an immediate invocation of the 25th Amendment, which admittedly was not really designed for such situations. The next best course of action would, of course, have been impeachment, the originally prescribed constitutional remedy for presidential malfeasance. Although not done as quickly as it should have been, eventually President Trump did achieve the distinction of being the second president ever to be impeached. By then it proved too late to remove him, but conviction would still have made a powerful point - and, maybe more importantly, would have disqualified him from running again. But the cowardly lions of the Republican party failed to seize the opportunity to liberate themselves from Trump's control. So instead the insurrectionist spirit survived. It has been evident in Republican antics for the past two years and is dramatically on display in the Republican party's present real-time meltdown on the floor of the House of Representatives.

"The Committee believes that those who took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution and then, on January 6th, engaged in insurrection can appropriately be disqualified and barred from holding government office—whether federal or state, civilian or military—absent at least two-thirds of Congress acting to remove the disability pursuant to Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment." Imagine if Congress had the institutional fortitude to do that!

What the current chaos in the House has highlighted (at 11 ballots and counting) is that Trumpism is very much with us. Far too many people are prepared to believe lies and live by lies. Trump did not so much create MAGA madness as exploit the madness which already existed and which remains alive and well, with or without Trump himself.

The 12th Day of Christmas

 

Today is the 12th Day of Christmas. Bring on those 12 drummers drumming! 

Even without such competing distractions as the Republican leadership meltdown on Capitol Hill, secular society has long since left Christmas behind, its legacy lingering only in the sad sight of cast-off Christmas trees in the city's streets awaiting garbage pickup. It is one of the curious characteristics of modernity to have reversed the classic sequence of Christmas celebration. In place of 12 days from Christmas until Epiphany Eve (or 40 days until Candlemas), the celebration of Christmas is anticipated in the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas (or even earlier) and ends (instead of begins) on Christmas Day, with a modest postscript preserved in the celebration of New Year. 

Around 1601 or early 1602, back when Christmas was still kept as Christmas, William Shakespeare composedTwelfth Night, or What You Will a romantic comedy believed to have been written as entertainment for Twelfth Night, at that time usually the big end-of-holiday party. (The play's first documented public performance was actually for the last of the Christmas season celebrations, Candlemas Day, February 2 1602.)

The title of that play is just one of the very few remaining cultural links left that remind us that there was once a different way of keeping Christmas from the secular consumerist model (which we have largely all collaborated in). For what it is worth, it is a memory worth holding onto.

So, take a break from the chaos that envelopes us. Happy Twelfth Day!

The MAGA Mess on Capitol Hill

 

"The Congress shall assemble at least once in every year, and such meeting shall begin at noon on the 3d day of January, unless they shall by law appoint a different day" (U.S. Constitution, 20th Amendment, section 2). 

And so the new Congress (including NY's now infamous Congressman-elect Santos) has assembled as prescribed, with the Republicans replacing the Democrats in ostensible "control" of the House of Representatives, and the Democrats keeping "control" of the Senate. The extreme difference between the two parties was quickly evident in Democrats' unified front behind their chosen leadership and the Republicans' internal shambles. Of course, the Republicans' lack of any significant legislative agenda together with the inevitable dysfunctionality of divided government has always made it likely that the House will be more about performative investigating (and possibly impeaching) than legislating. 

But, before anything can happen, the House has to choose its new Speaker. Normally, the party caucuses have settled on their candidates, and the vote is pro forma, a celebratory ceremonial occasion, when Representatives bring their families and take pictures together. But not this year!  

In one sense, it may hardly seem to matter which Republican becomes Speaker, since the Republicans' pathetically small majority means that 118th Congress will be fundamentally governed by the most extreme MAGA radicals in the Republican caucus. That said, the failure (so far) to be able to elect a Speaker further highlights the internal crackup within the already obviously dysfunctional Republican party. Not only did 19 Republicans defect from McCarthy on the first ballot, but to the Republicans's supreme embarrassment Democrat Jeffries actually won a plurality on the first ballot Jeffries 212, McCarthy 203, Other Republicans 19).

The last time the first vote failed, in 1923, it took three days and nine ballots before a speaker. was elected. (The all-time record was 33 ballots in 1855.) A repeat performance might please the chaos agents in the Republican caucus but would otherwise traumatize an already deeply dysfunctional and wounded institution.

It is a by now familiar manifestation of congressional dysfunction that Congress seems addicted to resolving crises at the last possible minute. So there was always the thought that maybe some last-minute solution might be found, or, at least, that the Republican dissenters, having successfully humiliated McCarthy by having forced a second and third ballot, might eventually relent and give him his gavel. The longer this goes on, however, such a scenario seems that much less likely. Even if and when the Republicans can elect a Speaker (whether McCarthy or someone else), how can they hope to govern effectively, whatever "govern" may mean in this MAGA mess world thy have created?

As I write this, the House has adjourned until tomorrow. The vote on the second ballot was the same as the first (Jeffries 212, McCarthy, 203, Other 19). By then, however, the Republican dissidents had coalesced around Ohio Congressman Jim Jordon, who had actually endorsed McCarthy, all of which suggested a deepening degree of intransigence, which continued into the third ballot, at which the Jordan vote increased by one at McCarthy's expense (Jeffries 212, McCarthy, 202, Other 19). Whatever (and whenever) the final outcome, after decades of encouraging extremism, the Republican party's chickens are coming home to roost!