Missionary to the Whole World

As if one Saint Patrick's Day per year were not enough, the calendrical quirk, according to which this year the anniversary of the saint's death falls on a Sunday, gives us two additional Saint Patrick's Days - the religious one on Monday, March 18, and the civic one, highlighted by the famous 5th-Avenue parade today. 

Other than the fact that he never saw, let alone ate, a potato, we don't know as much as we might wish about Saint Patrick. We do know that he was the son of a deacon and the grandson of a priest, who was born into a well-to-do family of landed gentry in the Roman province of Britain. At 16, his comfortable life suddenly ceased when he was captured and enslaved by Irish raiders. During 6 years as a slave herdsman in what is now County Mayo, Ireland, Patrick’s conventional Christianity was transformed into an ardent, fervent faith. After a successful escape and return to Britain, he felt a call to convert the pagan Irish to Christianity.  Ordained a bishop, he returned to Ireland and remained there until his death on March 17, 461.

 

Unlike Patrick’s home island of Britain, Ireland had never been part of the Roman Empire. It was beyond the borders of what then constituted civilization. Saint Patrick stands out as one of the first in Western Christian history to feel the imperative to evangelize beyond the borders of the Empire, to take literally the the Gospel’s mandate to teach all nations.  In his Confession, Patrick described his sense of mission. “I want to spend myself in that country, even in death, if the Lord should grant me this favor. I am deeply in his debt, for he gave me the great grace that through me many peoples should be reborn in God, and then made perfect by confirmation and everywhere among them clergy ordained for a people so recently coming to believe, one people gathered by the Lord from the ends of the earth. ... It is among that people that I want to wait for the promise made by him, who assuredly never tells a lie. ... This is our faith: believers are to come from the whole world.”

 

An altar in honor of the great missionary Saint Patrick is found at the east end of the north aisle of the mother church of the Paulist Fathers in New York, the city of which Saint Patrick is also patron. It was designed by the same John LaFarge who also directed the original design of the church's nave, painted the circular mural The Angel of the Moon on the south wall of the sanctuary, and did the two blue end windows above the sanctuary and the five lancet windows above the main door. The altarpiece (photo) was painted by William Laurel Harris, who also painted the large mural The Crucifixion over the main door. It portrays St. Patrick, flanked by Saints Columba and Bridget, driving out paganism, while, above, St. Patrick preaches to an Irish chieftan. 

In this particularly challenging period in the Church's life, when so much ecclesial energy is focused internally and Catholic elites are increasingly polarized about issues of internal church organization and polity, it is good to be reminded of the Church's missionary mandate. It may also serve as a bittersweet reminder that the mandate is never fully fulfilled, that many places once seemingly converted to Christ and his Church have since followed other paths and require re-evangelization, which may prove to be the contemporary Church's most pressing - and neglected - task.

Cabrini (The Movie)

 

She is the patron saint of immigrants, Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, who lived from 1850 to 1917. Born in Italy, she founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart in 1880, of which she remained Superior General until her death. When she asked Pope Leo XIII's approval to establish a mission in China, the Pope advised her to go "not to the east, but to the west" - to the United States to serve the immense needs of the hordes of poor Italian immigrants who were then flooding the cities of the United States. So, she and six other sisters came to New York, where, like so many other Italian immigrants, she was less than enthusiastically received by those in charge, including New York's Irish Catholic establishment – in her case, New York’s Archbishop Michael Corrigan. But she persisted in her mission, and over time she founded some 67 institutions in major cities both in the United States and in South America. In their day, those institutions served Italian and other immigrants and made a notable impact in their communities. Mother Cabrini died in Chicago on December 22, 1917, and is buried where her American mission began, here in New York, in a shrine on Fort Washington Avenue near Fort Tryon Park in northern Manhattan. Having become a naturalized American citizen in 1909 (thus, in effect, experiencing herself the fullness of the American immigrant experience), she became the first American citizen to be canonized in 1946. Mother Cabrini had special significance for my grandmother, who, as long as she lived, made sure that we went to visit her shrine yearly to honor the great Italian patron of immigrants to the New World.  

And now she is the subject of a full-length film, Cabrini, released earlier this month, which highlights her missionary and charitable efforts and the resistance she encountered, especially the anti-Italian bigotry and racism. The film focuses on the desperate plight of Italian immigrants in New York and on Mother Cabrini's immense energy (despite her physical frailty) and her enormous ability as in effect a shrewd entrepreneur, founding what the film calls "an empire of hope." In conventional treatments of her story, both her physical frailties and her business acumen are acknowledged but always seem secondary to her accomplishments. In this film, they remain front and center, giving her accomplishments a fuller, more rounded dimension.

In Shakespeare in Love, Queen Elizabeth I refers to herself as "a woman in a man's profession." Cabrini seems to want to highlight how Saint Francis Cabrini was a woman very much disrupting a men's world. In fact, much of the same could be said of many modern religious foundresses. Indeed, for much of its history, the Catholic church. has provided women with a unique outlet for this-worldly talent through the institutions of women's religious communities, especially teaching and health-care communities, of which many were founded here in the U.S. and Canada.

Overwhelmingly, the film focuses our attention not just on the plight of the late 19th-century Italian immigrants but. on the ethnic-racial-religious hostility to them on the part of the civic establishment and the larger society. Perhaps particularly relevant is how it portrays the struggle on the part of New York's Irish Archbishop to come to terms with the reality of a new ethnic component to his hitherto largely Irish flock. It offers insight into the dilemma that has faced each successive wave of immigration to this country, as unwelcome outsiders eventually get a toehold and gradually advance in society and then challenged their predecessors not to close the door behind them but to recognize their common humanity with the new immigrants. This, of course, is so very much an issue today as a nation composed almost entirely of descendants of desperate immigrants is confronted with the morally and politically challenging task of accepting and integrating new immigrants to our country.

The story of Mother Cabrini is always edifying and always relevant. It may be never more so, however, than at this particular juncture in American history, when who we are as a people, as "a nation of immigrants," is once again one of the central issues confronting the soul of America.

Oscar Night

The 96th Academy Awards - Hollywood's annual celebration of itself - took place last night. Because of travel, I missed the first part of the show. Usually, when I have watched the Oscar show, it has been more for social reasons than an overwhelming interest in the proceedings themselves. Las nights show, however, seemed - at least to my unsophisticated tastes - an improvement on past performances. Best of all, it seemed shorter, ending at a decent hour.

It was no surprise that Oppenheimer more or less stole the show. Personally, I would have given The Holdovers' Paul Giamatti the Oscar for Best Actor, but it is always hard to stop a runaway train. Robert Downey, Jr., may well have deserved his award, but Oppenheimer would have been a better move without most of the last hour, in which case Downey's award would inevitably have had to go to someone else. 

As seems typical of very long movies, Oppenheimer is likely longer than it needs to be. Apart, obviously, from the dramatic, convincingly scary, central scene of the Trinity atomic test, it is largely a three-hour talk-fest. Its artistry seems to me to be overdone and thus gets in the way of the story. Accordingly, I have been criticized for disrespecting the director's artistry, but artistic self-expression leaves me unmoved, whatever the medium. That said, its length is worth sitting through, and its artistry of entangled timelines, constant scene-shifting amid a confusingly large cohort of famous scientists (whose names most of us no longer remember or never knew), and its gratuitous back-and-forth from color to black-and-white are all still worth the extra work they impose on the audience.

Oppenheimer aside, it was nice that the original Mothers Day got so much attention at the Oscars. Maybe the most moving moment was when Mstyslav Chernov accepted the documentary award for 20 Days in Mariupol, which he called Ukraine’s first Oscar. Given what is happening (or perhaps one should say not happening) in Washington right now, the reminder of the Ukraine war's civilizational significance was timely. And, in keeping with the evening's primary purpose of focusing on movies, I resonated with what may prove to be one of the evening's more memorable comments, “Cinema forms memories and memories form histories.”

Otherwise, the Oscars show seemed somewhat less political than usual - apart from Jimmy Kimmel's great "Isn't it past your jail time?" response to Donald Trump, who unsurprisingly could not resist the opportunity for a real-time post on Truth Social by Trump. “Has there ever been a worse host than Jimmy Kimmel at the Oscars.” In that exchange (and with that audience) Kimmel clearly won.

But for me the most fun part of the evening had to be Ryan Gosling's rousingly wild, show stopping, rendition of I’m Just Ken. All in all, quite contrary to my recent experience and despite the obvious lack of suspense about most of the winners, the Oscar show was actually fun to watch this year!

Mid-Lent in East Tennessee

 

A couple of weeks ago, we all heard Peter’s famous words while watching Jesus transfigured: Lord, it is good for us to be here! Now I am not Peter, and Summit Hill is not quite Mount Tabor, but – with all the appropriate caveats – I can with all my heart echo Peter today: how good it is to be here! In my 28+ years of priesthood, I have had an abundance of good experiences, but I can say with no exaggeration that I never have I been happier as a priest than in my 10 years here as your pastor. So, it is good to be here!

 

And in that spirit of genuine joy, we mark this Laetare Sunday, as is the Church’s custom with rose vestments and flowers on the altar, traditional symbols of rejoicing, even as we push full speed ahead into the even more somber second half of Lent.

 

Last night, some of you were present at The Foundry for our retrospective on 50 years of Paulist ministry in Knoxville. In fact, as many of you may know, the Paulist Fathers have been serving the Church in Tennessee much longer than that, starting way back in 1900 with 54 years of mission outreach in Middle Tennessee. With Winchester, TN, as the Paulist Fathers’ home base, those early missionaries preached literally from a trailer and helped establish parishes which still thrive today in the capable hands of the local diocesan clergy. Then, from 1954 until 2013, the Paulist Fathers maintained a major mission parish in Memphis. And then, as you all know, we have been here in Knoxville since 1973, sharing the good news of Christ and the life of his Church in this city’s downtown at its oldest Catholic Church and at its university. 

 

As Paulist Fathers, we are committed obviously to the mission of the Church and, in a special way, to our founder, Servant of God Isaac Hecker’s conviction that the Catholic Church was just what American culture needed. The world has changed a lot since Hecker’s time, but the Church’s mission - our mission - remains the same. 

As Pope Saint John Paul II famously said: “Those who have come into genuine contact with Christ cannot keep him for themselves, they must proclaim him.” It was for that reason that Hecker felt inspired by the example of Saint Paul and chose him as our community’s patron.

 

Along with preaching and teaching and organizing local churches and recruiting leaders for them, an important part of Paul’s apostolic activity was raising money. According to the Acts of the Apostles, Paul and his mission partner, Barnabas, brought financial aid for the struggling community in Jerusalem from the Church in Antioch when they went to Jerusalem around the year 46 [Acts 11:29-30]. Over the next decade, a very busy and productive period for Paul, he continued to raise money from his Gentile converts to assist the struggling Church in Jerusalem and wrote about this in some detail in his two letters to the Corinthians [1 Corinthians 16:1-4; 2 Corinthians 8–9] and in his letter to the Romans [Romans 15:25-33]. 

 

Paul’s Financial Appeal was a charitable response to the real needs and struggles of the Jerusalem community and the special responsibilities the Jerusalem Church had in relation to other Christian communities. It was also an expression of – and, for his Gentile converts, a lesson in - the unity and interdependence of individuals and local communities in the wider Church. Paul took this responsibility very seriously, as an essential expression of what it means to be a Church community, what it means to be diverse and different people all united in one Church, one Body of Christ. That is the spirit in which we should approach all the appeals we receive to unite our efforts to meet the multiple needs of the Church here and elsewhere. Among those is our Annual Paulist Appeal, our annual invitation to you to contribute as you can to continue the life and mission of the Paulist Fathers as we with our reduced numbers and aging membership still seek to make real Hecker’s conviction that the Catholic Church is just what American culture needs – because, as we just heard, God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.

 

At a particularly challenging and decisive moment in Israel’s history, God called the king of Persia, of all people, to be his chosen instrument in restoring Israel and its Temple. Likewise today, God continues to call upon each of us in surprising and unexpected ways to do surprising and unexpected things.

 

Homily for the 4^th Sunday of Lent (Laetare Sunday) and the Annual Paulist Appeal, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, March 10, 2014.

 

 

750

 

Fifty years ago today, to mark the 700th anniversary of the death of Saint Thomas Aquinas, some of us celebrated that occasion with the late Professor Paul Sigmund and a bottle of Chilean wine at dinner in the Princeton University Graduate College's Proctor Hall. 

Much earlier (long before I was a grad student), most of my elementary school teachers had been Blauvelt Dominican Sisters. From them, I learned bits and pieces about the Dominican Order's history and distinctive liturgy. (We even recited the Rosary in the distinctively Dominican manner.)  Above all, however, we learned a lot about the Dominicans' favorite son among the saints and Doctors of the Church, Saint Thomas Aquinas, who was especially relevant to us as the author of the two hymns (O salutaris and Tantum ergo), which we sang so frequently at Benediction of the Most Blessed Sacrament.  At school, we also learned the familiar story of how young Thomas met the Dominicans at the new University of Naples, how his family opposed his professing a mendicant vocation, how they kidnapped him in 1244, and how he persevered in his vocation in spite of all family pressure. (During his captivity at the family's castles at Montesangiovanni and Roccasecca, the young Thomas supposedly read through the entire bible and also studied Peter Lombard's Sentences.) 

At some point, I encountered G.K. Chesterton's short 1933 classic account of Thomas's life, The Dumb Ox, which took its title from a famous story about the young Thomas and his classmates as students of Saint Albert the Great.  (Patron saint of scientists, Albert studied Aristotle and wrote a commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, during the very time Thomas was studying with him in Cologne.) 

Maybe more memorable for me than Chesterton's The Dumb Ox, however, was my reading in high school of Louis de Wohl's 1950 historical novel about Aquinas, The Quiet Light, which situated Thomas's religious vocation and theological achievement against the tumultuous background of 13th-century medieval Christendom in total turmoil. It was only later, in graduate school, the I engaged directly with the Angelic Doctor, primarily with his political and legal philosophy, some of which seems surprisingly topical today. (For example, at the end of chapter 6 of part 1 of De Regime Principum, Thomas warns about political actors who, not caring about the glory classically achieved by virtuous action, desire only to dominate and will openly commit crimes to obtain what they want.) 

Formed in the Aristotelian-Averroist atmosphere of the new University of Naples (founded by Frederick II, "Stupor Mundi," as an imperial rather than ecclesiastical institution), the young Thomas arrived at an early appreciation of Aristotle's philosophy - at a time when that was an increasingly controversial position. For Thomas, all truth - whether divinely revealed truth accessible through faith or naturally knowable truth accessible to anyone through philosophy - is truth. There are thus two kinds of truth but only one truth, which admits no contradiction. If Christian doctrine is true, then it must not be contradicted by the wisdom accessible to ordinary human beings, which is based on what we can understand from the world, within which we human beings are rooted. Theology is faith seeking understanding, relating what is incomprehensible to what is naturally knowable. Thomism was Christian history's most systematic answer to the perennial problematic (still very much with us today) of how to connect what is believed by divine revelation with what is naturally knowable both by believers and non-believers - addressing contemporary realities in a timely manner making use of both old and new wisdom.

In the theologically and polarized environment of the early medieval universities, Thomas's profession required him to participate in public disputations. But he treated these primarily as a common effort to arrive at truth rather than as a competition. How unlike the modern university, which one of my professors once described as "a holding company for individual entrepreneurs."

In the 16th century, Thomas was the first "modern" saint to be recognized officially as a Doctor of the Church, joining the ancient Doctors - Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory the Great. He is known as Doctor communis, the common or universal teacher. But he is also called Doctor angelicus, the Angelic Doctor, which reminds us how Thomas was always so much more than a university professor.

First and foremost, however, Thomas was a Dominican friar, who had successfully resisted the strenuous efforts of his powerful family in order to live the life of a mendicant, a vocation in some ways as controversial in the 13th-century Church as being as Aristotelian was. As an Order of Preachers, the Dominicans were especially devoted to study and cultivated an intellectual vocation, but that was always understood as serving the spiritual benefit of others (as the General Chapter of 1220 had explicitly prescribed). Thomas certainly saw himself as a contemplative, but he accorded the highest religious status to a kind of contemplative life that produced benefits for others in the form of preaching and teaching. Thus, he wrote his Summa ad eruditionem incipientium, for the instruction of beginners. And the same Saint Thomas who excelled as an author and professor, writing and teaching in Latin, also employed his talents as a public preacher in Italian churches. I am reminded of Louis Bouyer's observation in his Memoirs that, unless pursued within the context of Church ministry, theology "loses contact with what gives it meaning," and "can either vanish into fruitless abstractions or degenerate into an almost empty verbal pastime."

When faced with a challenge, Thomas prepared by prayer. He was, above all, a priest, a person of prayer, which he considered the most important contemplative activity and which he also recognized as God's gift. He went to confession daily, said Mass, and then served or attended another Mass in thanksgiving. His devotion to the Eucharist was recognized when Pope Urban IV commissioned him to compose the Office and Mass for the new feast of Corpus Christi (from which were derived those familiar Benediction hymns). Before receiving Communion shortly before his death, Thomas prayed: "I receive you, price of my soul's redemption; I receive you, Viaticum for my pilgrimage, for whose love I have studied, kept watch, labored, preached, and taught."

One may only hope that the same scholarly spirit that contributed so much to the renewal of the Church amid the political and intellectual turbulence of the 13th century may illuminate and inspire the ongoing renewal of religious life and the Church amid today's terrible tumults!

Photo: Image of Saint Thomas Aquinas, formerly on display at the Paulist Fathers' Seminary in Washington, DC, now at the Paulist Fathers' Motherhouse in New York City.