Jerusalem Memories

Today is the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Six-Day War. At the time, I was temporarily living in a very Jewish environment in Queens, NY. I remember very well the anxiety that suddenly seemed to preoccupy people in response to Egyptian President Nasser's threats and the UN's obsequiousness - the sudden sense that the very survival of Israel and of the Jewish People was once again at stake. I remember the morning when the war began. Above all, I remember when and how it ended, with total Israeli victory. 

That victory made possible the unification of the Holy City of Jerusalem, artificially divided by the 1949 armistice. I can still visualize the enormous outpouring of emotion as Jews were once again free to pray at the Western Wall, which they had been prohibited from visiting since Jordan's seizure and occupation of East Jerusalem back during Israel's War of Independence. I had always wanted to visit the sacred Christians sites in the Holy Land, and now I mentally added the Wall and the Temple Mount to my list - little knowing, of course, when (or even if) I might actually get there. and certainly never imagining the vocational context in which I would finally find myself there. That came to pass some 26 years later, when I spent a summer at the Tantur Ecumenical Institute in Jerusalem (photo).

Ironically, ground was broken for the Tantur Ecumenical Institute on a 36-acre hill on the Jerusalem to Bethlehem road, on June 4, 1967 - the very day before the war began. At that time, the site was in Jordanian-occupied Jerusalem. A week later it was in Israel. Tantur resulted from meetings of Pope Paul VI with Protestant Observers during Vatican II and with Orthodox Patriarch Athenagoras I in Jerusalem in 1964. The property is owned by the Holy See, which leased it to the Notre Dame University for the administration of the institute. Although primarily set up for scholars, Tantur in the 1990s also ran a summer program for non-scholars, which I was able to take advantage of in 1993. The Director at that time was my own former novice master from 12 years earlier. So it was a naturally welcoming setting for me to experience the Holy Land. 

Summer 1993 was a relatively peaceful period In Israel. (I was there in June and July. On September 13, the so-called "Oslo Accord" was signed in Washington by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rbin and Yasser Arafat.) That summer we were able to travel safely almost everywhere. (Hebron was the one exception.) Not only did we get to visit most of the sites officially as a group, but there was plenty of free time to explore both Jerusalem and Bethlehem on one's own. I walked the couple of miles to and from Jerusalem on my own more than once and unhesitatingly rode both Jewish and Arab buses back and forth. 

It was fashionable then to refer to the Holy Land as 'the 5th Gospel." Certainly living in the Holy Land - "running where Jesus walked" (and often enough just walking where Jesus walked) - was a great eye-opener. I remember once waiting at a bus stop and watching a shepherd across the road call his sheep, and thinking, Oh, that's what Jesus meant!

As Paulist Fathers' Founder Servant of God Isaac Hecker himself expressed it, reacting to his own profoundly spiritual experience in the Holy Land in the early 1870s: "In reciting the Gloria and the Credo, after having been in the localities where the great mysteries which they express took place, one is impressed in a wonderful manner with their actuality. The truths of our holy faith seem to saturate one’s blood, enter into one’s flesh, and penetrate even to the marrow of one’s bones." 

The experience also highlighted for me the centrality of the promised land in the covenant God made with the Jewish People, a covenant which is still relevant. According to the Second Vatican Council's timely reminder: God does not repent of the gifts He makes nor of the calls He issues (Cf. Romans 11:28-29).                                                  

Pentecost

Seven weeks have passed since we celebrated the Lord’s resurrection. That may seem like a long time to us - living as we now live at a faster pace than people have ever tried to live before. But it is not really a long time by any traditional measure. From the accounts that have come down to us – in the Gospels and in the Acts of the Apostles - one gets a sense of that original Easter season as a time of transition, as the focus perceptibly shifts from what Jesus has been doing to what the disciples are going to do. As we all know, it takes time – sometimes a lot of time – to get people properly prepared for a major undertaking. We typically allow not seven but ten weeks for a newly elected American President to staff his Administration in the transition from election to inauguration. Likewise the Risen Lord used the transitional time from Easter to Ascension to prepare his disciples for the task ahead, laying out his program, and getting them “on board” to implement it, eventually empowering them with the gift of the Holy Spirit.  Now, it’s Pentecost, and the implementation part begins in earnest.

That’s assuming, of course, that we even notice! Pentecost was once one of the greatest festivals of the Church year, on a par with Easter. Sixty years ago, it still had a week-long octave like Easter, and even had its own Saturday morning vigil (complete a blessing of baptismal water). At one time, Kings and Queens were expected to wear their crowns publicly on Pentecost. About all that’s left of all that now, in post-Christian Europe, is the 3-day Whitsun weekend. And here in the U.S., we don’t even have that.

Pentecost is Greek for the 50th day (in this case the 50th day after Passover). It started out as the second of the three pilgrimage feasts in the Jewish agricultural calendar. In time, it became a commemoration of the covenant at Mount Sinai, which occurred (according to Exodus) about seven weeks after Israel’s escape from Egypt. Just as summer fulfills the promise of spring, the giving of the commandments fulfilled the promise of nationhood, of which the exodus had been but the beginning; and Pentecost’s gift of the Holy Spirit fulfilled the promise of the resurrection, transforming the disciples into faith-filled witnesses testifying to the wider world.

The contemporary Easter hymn In the Breaking of the Bread tells the story of the Risen Jesus’ appearance to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, which was our Gospel reading a few weeks ago on the 3rd Sunday of Easter. The third verse continues the story to Pentecost:

But then we became afraid without him,

In the darkened room we stayed without him,

Waiting for the One he said that he would send.

Then the Spirit of the Lord came down upon us,

Filling us, changing us, giving us the strength to say,

We saw him!

Suddenly our eyes were opened,

And we knew he was alive!

Pentecost is often called “the birthday of the Church,” since, as a result of having received the gift of the Holy Spirit at the Pentecost following Jesus’ Ascension, the apostles began the Church’s mission of preaching the Gospel to the whole world. Pentecost and the Church are what fulfill and complete the promise of Easter and carry Easter into the world of day-to-day life and work.

In a famous mosaic in the dome of the Basilica di San Marco in Venice, the 16 nationalities (Parthians, Medes, Elamites, etc.), who are mentioned in the story as having heard the Gospel preached in their native languages (thus undoing the damage done to the human community as a consequence of the Tower of Babel) are all represented in the scene, each by a male and female pair (an image of the universality of the Church).

For the Holy Spirit has not been given to us just so that we can feel good about ourselves, so that we can continue Christ’s presence among us in some purely private way (as if the Church were just a social club or some sort of inward-looking therapeutic community). On the contrary, the community which continues Christ’s life and work in the world must be as broad and wide as the world itself, which is why it must speak as many languages as there are to be heard in the world.

And so the hymn continues:

We ran out into the street to tell them,

Everyone that we could meet, to tell them,

“God has raised him up and we have seen the Lord!”

We took bread as he had done and then we

Blessed it, broke it, offered it. In the breaking of the bread,

We saw him!

Suddenly our eyes were opened,

And we knew he was alive!

The Pentecost story reminds us that, since apostolic times, Sunday has been the privileged day when the Church experiences in her liturgy the continued presence of the Risen Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit, which is why our attendance at Sunday mass is such an essential requirement of Catholic life. But Pentecost is also an annual reminder of what happens every week with the transition from Sunday to Monday. In the calendar, Pentecost marks the annual transition from Easter time to Ordinary Time, our time, the time of the Church, when what began with the resurrection takes effect in our daily lives, and when those initiated into the Church at Easter finish looking back at that experience and become at last just ordinary Catholics. From our weekly Sunday celebration around the unleavened bread which has become the body of our Risen Lord, we are sent out to the world, as one body and one spirit in Christ, as the Risen Lord’s permanent presence in the leavened bread of our daily lives in the world.

In that sense, Easter doesn’t end at Pentecost - any more than Mass ends with the Dismissal. We do indeed depart, but we do so changed and energized – sent out in the power of the Holy Spirit to renew the face of the earth.

And so the hymn concludes:

In the breaking of the bread,

He is here with us again.

And we know he is alive!

Homily for Pentecost Sunday, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville TN, June 4, 2017.

JFK at 100

Today, May 29, 2017, would have been President John F. Kennedy's 100th birthday. Dying relatively young (at 46), our 35th president remains forever that way in my generation's memory, along with his young wife and children. (The photo portrays the President and his family outside church on Easter Sunday 1963, Jackie was then pregnant with their final child Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, who was born and died that August, just months before JFK's own death in November.)

I was just 12 when JFK was elected president and 15 when he died, but my recollections of both events are crystal clear. In our blue-collar, working class, Bronx Catholic "ghetto," the most momentous thing about Kennedy's election was that it "dropped a hydrogen bomb" (as one newspaper editorial expressed it at the time) on the tradition that a Catholic could not be elected president. Kennedy did little to call attention his minority religion as president, but it was always in the background, being most dramatically on display finally at this funeral. For both better and worse, the Kennedy years finalized European immigrant Catholicism's assimilation into mainstream American society and culture. Secure in our present position in American society, we Catholics might do well to remind ourselves of the intense, anti-Catholic polemics that were a normal part of American political discourse not that long ago. Many of the things some say about Muslim immigrants now used to be said as routinely then about Catholic immigrants a century ago, .

The religious issue aside, the Kennedy Administration, already known for its youth and glamor, was retroactively reimagined afterwards as "Camelot" after his death. What it was in fact was the well deserved coming to power not of the Knights of the Roundtable but of the "Greatest Generation" - famously described by Kennedy in his Inaugural Address as "born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace." (It was Nixon's generation as well and so would have come into its own either way. In 1960, both candidates were close in age. Both were well qualified war veterans who shared more or less the same political views. The main difference was that Nixon came from a poor background and got where he got mainly by hard work and diligence. Kennedy came from wealth and privilege and got where he got mainly by means of his wealth, privilege, good looks, and personal charm. Given a choice, the American people voted, unsurprisingly, to reward wealth, privilege, good looks, and personal charm.) 

Historically, the Kennedy years were the fulfillment of the post-war era's promise of the most widely shared prosperity in human history, reflected in a shared bi-partisan consensus. At the same time, however, the Kennedy years set the stage for the eventual fraying of that consensus in the aftermath of the civil rights movement at home and the Vietnam War abroad.

There is something strange about our contemporary obsession with youth and beauty - so contrary to the more traditional, commonsense view that authentic wisdom is more likely found among the elders. But what happens to that traditional commonsense when the pace of change renders the elders' wisdom problematic and when society's elders' failures far outshine their accomplishments, both of which have characterized the half century plus since Kennedy's death? Add to that the fact that the immediate aftermath of the Kennedy years marked the coming of age of my own Baby Boom generation, the largest generation in history, a generation formed by the "Greatest Generation," but so completely unlike it in our narcissistic self-preoccupation.

Socrates the ancient Athenian philosopher was an old man and reputedly ugly. The contrast between his external appearance and his virtue and wisdom highlighted for his disciple Plato the great gulf between appearance and reality. In Kennedy (and subsequent Kennedy-like figures) we have repeatedly chosen to put our faith in appearance. Perhaps some of the failures of the Kennedy presidency (and more recently of its pale imitation in the Obama presidency) reflect that problematic preference.

The Ascension

Back where I grew up, the Ascension is still celebrated on its proper day (this past Thursday). So, there, one is still greeted in the morning by the local news’ announcement that in the entire city what is called “alternate side of the street parking” is suspended because of the holy day. It’s even better in Germany, for example, where Ascension is still a legal holiday and where even the Stock Market is closed in observance of the Ascension. 

Back when I was a kid, of course, what we especially liked about the Ascension was that we got off from school. And certainly some of us here are also old enough to remember the wonderful old custom of ceremonially extinguishing the Easter Candle – the symbol of the Risen Christ’s presence among us – after the reading of today’s Gospel. Even more dramatically, in certain places, either the candle itself or a statue of the Risen Christ would be hoisted up to the church’s ceiling, to be replaced by a shower of roses as a sign of Christ’s parting promise to give the Holy Spirit to the Church. The point of such rituals, of course, was not to highlight Christ’s absence, but rather the new way he is now present to us. As the Church prays in the Preface of today’s Mass: he ascended, not to distance himself from our lowly state but that we, his members might be confident of following where he, our Head and Founder, has gone before.

Historically speaking, the Ascension commemorates the end of the Risen Lord’s series of periodic appearances to his disciples in the weeks after his resurrection. The Risen Jesus no longer walked earth the way he did before he died and rose, but he did, as Luke says in today’s 1st reading, appear a number of times to his disciples during that post-Easter period of 40 days [Acts 1:1-11], speaking about the kingdom of God.

So, now, if Jesus doesn’t walk the earth as he did before, where exactly is he? Theologically speaking, the Ascension celebrates what we profess every Sunday in the Creed, that he is seated at the right had of the Father, where, as the letter to the Hebrews assures us he lives forever to intercede for us [Hebrews 7:25; cf. Romans 8:34].

On the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, pilgrims can see a footprint-like depression in a rock (photo), which purports to be the spot from which Jesus ascended into heaven. The footprint and the idea that he pushed off with such force that he left a footprint in the rock may be a bit fanciful, but it does make the important point that it is Jesus’ real human body (and thus the real human nature that we share with him) that is now with God. So the Church prays today in the Eucharistic Prayer, he placed at the right hand of your glory our weak human nature, which he had united to himself. As Pope Francis has recently reminded us: Even though the Lord may now appear more distant, the horizons of hope expand all the more. In Christ, who brings our human nature to heaven, every man and woman can now freely “enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh” [Hebrews10:19-20].

So the Ascension anticipates what the resurrection has made it possible for us all to hope for. Meanwhile - in this interval between Ascension and the end, a time full of problems and challenges of every sort, of crises and conflicts in the world and even in the Church, not to mention all our own personal problems and worries, in this interval between Ascension and the end – we too may be tempted to doubt, just like the apostles in the Gospel. Yet, although he is absent in one way, he has nonetheless promised to remain present: behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age [Matthew 28:20]. Hence his instruction to his disciples to wait for the Holy Spirit, the promise of the Father.

This Jesus, who lived and died and now lives again forever with his Father, far from being absent, is actually still very much present among us by the power of his promised gift of the Holy Spirit, who is always at work in the Church, through which we remain connected with him, so that, through us, he can continue his work of transforming our world. Again, as Pope Francis, has expressed it:

Those who, in faith, entrust themselves to the guidance of the Holy Spirit come to realize how God is present and at work in every moment of our lives and history, patiently bringing to pass a history of salvation. [Papal Message for the 51^st Annual World Communications Day]

Homily for the Ascension of the Lord, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, May 28, 2017.

A Week of Wonderful English Saints

The current Starz TV series The White Princess (sequel to The White Queen, both based on Philippa Gregory's novels about the Wars of the Roses) focuses on Elizabeth of York, wife of England's Henry VII, who founded the Tudor dynasty, after defeating the last Yorkist king, Richard III, at Bosworth Field on August 22, 1485). As part of the peace between the rival houses of Lancaster and York, Henry married Elizabeth (daughter of Edward IV and niece of Richard III). The two of them are thus the ancestors of all subsequent English and (from James V on) all Scottish monarchs, down to the present occupant of the British throne. ("The White Queen" was her mother, Elizabeth Woodville, wife of Edward IV, mother of the murdered "princes in the Tower.") 

A relatively minor character (photo) is the Queen's first cousin, Margaret Plantagenet (1473-1541), daughter of Edward IV's and Richard III's traitor brother George, Duke of Clarence. In the series, as in real life, Margaret was married off in 1487 to King Henry's cousin, Sir Richard Pole, who eventually became Chamberlain for Henry's first son, Arthur. Margaret, in turn became lady-in-waiting to Arthur's wife, Catherine of Aragon, a role she resumed later when Henry VIII married his widowed sister-in-law. As countess of Salibury in her own right, she was wealthy and prominent. Her son Reginald Pole eventually became a Cardinal and, during Mary Tudor's Catholic restoration, Archbishop of Canterbury - the last Catholic Archbishop in that line. Her and her son's fidelity to the Catholic faith (and their potential claim as surviving Plantagenet Yorkist heirs to the English throne) eventually caused the English Reformation's proto-Stalin, Henry VIII, to imprison her in the Tower, where she was executed on May 27, 1541. Her son, Cardinal Pole, subsequently said he would "never fear to call himself the son of a martyr." And In 1886 she was duly beatified by Pope Leo XIII. May 28 is the date assigned for her commemoration.

Margaret Pole is one of three outstanding English saints celebrated this week. On Thursday, in places where the Ascension is postponed to Sunday, we celebrated the Venerable Bede (c.673-735), a monk at Jarrow in Northumbria, author most famously of Ecclesiastical History of the English People, as a result of which he is remembered as "the Father of English History." He wrote much else beside, including some poetry in the vernacular. Among other things, he also popularized the use of the new (now universally used) dating system based on the Birth of Christ (Anno Domini). His scholarly reputation extended far beyond his home island, and he was mentioned by Dante in the Divine Comedy (Paradiso, X). However his feast became part of the general Roman calendar only in 1899. It was originally assigned to May 27, but in 1969 was moved to May 25.

And today the Church commemorates the great Saint Augustine of Canterbury (534-604), the Roman monk sent by Pope Saint Gregory the Great to evangelize the English and who founded the See of Canterbury in 597. His relics were lost during the barbaric destruction of the English Reformation, but a new shrine has been recently re-establlished near the site where he first landed in England. Celebrated in Britain on May 26 and elsewhere on May 28 until 1969, he is now celebrated on May 27.

The Collect for today's Mass prays "that the fruits of [Saint Augustine's] labors may remain ever abundant in your Church." And so they did, reaping a rich harvest for more than six centuries until the wanton destruction inspired by Henry VIII's lust for unlimited, unchecked spiritual as well as temporal power.

This unique collection of great English saints in one week is, of course, coincidental. Still, it highlights for us English-speakers the great debt we all owe to our linguistic ancestors who brought the Catholic faith to the English-speaking world, nourished it with their piety and scholarship, and defended it to the point of martyrdom at the hands of a monster monarch whose insatiable lust for power led him to the mother of all Brexits, gratuitously separating his kingdom from the Universal Church, in the process destroying countless lives and erasing a great nation's glorious religious heritage.