Time After Pentecost - Time After Pandemic

Traditionally, the post-paschal liturgical season that went from Trinity Sunday through the Saturday before Advent was called the "Time after Pentecost." According to the lay person's Missal which I used growing up, the Church during this season (which could cover a full half of the year) "urges her children to be more docile to the promptings of the Holy Spirit who desires to live in us and animate us with divine love, so that we grow in virtue and become ever more like the Holy One of God, our Lord Jesus Christ." This reflected the then prevailing understanding of the liturgical year, the first half of which recalled Christ's incarnation, public life, death, and resurrection, culminating in the giving of the Holy Spirit, followed by the second half of the year which recalled Christ's continued presence in his Church through the ongoing action of his Holy Spirit.

That liturgical tradition, which kept the connection between Pentecost and what we now uninspiringly call "Ordinary Time," highlighted the close bond between the Holy Spirit and the present life of the Church, which has been constituted as Christ's Body by his communication of his Spirit (cf. Vatican II, Lumen Gentium, 7 and 14). In the 19th-century language of continuous incarnation, Isaac Hecker (1819-1888) wrote "the Incarnation involves Christ's indwelling presence in His Church acting upon man and society through her agency until the consummation of the world" (The Church and the Age, p. 256). Since Pentecost, it is the Holy Spirit, who has continued Christ's presence and action in the world through the Church. This time of the Holy Spirit thus continues the time of Christ in the experience of his Church. This is what we ritualize in this second half of the liturgical year - the long present between Pentecost and the end, for which all that was recalled in the first half of the year has prepared us.

The "Time after Pentecost" is both the ongoing present time of the Church - the long present between Pentecost and the end - and an annual occurrence that punctuates our otherwise ordinary and seemingly spiritless lives. This year, the annual recurrence of this "Time after Pentecost" corresponds (in the United States, at least) to an unprecedented (in our lifetimes) "Time after Pandemic." In this time of emergence from the covid-19 pandemic and our unprecedented response to it, the Church's perennial post-Pentecost challenge to continue Christ's life and work in the world, renewing the face of the earth through the presence and action of the Holy Spirit, somehow must be experienced again in a world in which the Church has seemed somewhat absent. In fact, the Church had already become increasingly absent from more and more of the world for quite some time, but the pandemic - by literally closing the churches and absenting from its sanctuaries the faithful that still remained - has accelerated that problematic process, with long-term consequences that remain yet to be understood. Meanwhile, this experience has made all the unfortunate trends that ought to have been obvious before seem increasingly obvious now.

Of course, the Spirit blows where he will [cf. John 3:8]. So we must not set human limits on God's grace and providence. We do not yet know the full impact of the pandemic on the Church. Still, as we emerge from hiding, there are some things we do know and some steps we can take - and some self-inflicted damage we need not do. For example, in his first apologetical book, Questions of the Soul (1855), Servant of God Isaac Hecker pointedly opposed speaking to the world "in a sour, crabbed, and angry spirit." Sadly so much of what is now associated with contemporary Christianity in the United States sometimes sounds "sour, crabbed, and angry" - increasingly so, as the saving and healing breath of the Holy Spirit seems more obscured than revealed by so many factors of our own making, among them exclusionary ideological and political posturing presenting itself as devotion to religious fidelity and religious freedom.

(Photo: Dove of the Holy Spirit, Baroque oval stained glass window above Saint Peter's Chair "cathedra"  over the Altar of the Chair in the apse of Saint Peter's Basilica.)

A Medieval Heroine and the Modern Nation

At his second inaugural, on March 4 1865, Abraham Lincoln famously said of the two opposing sides in the Civil War:  "Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. ... That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes." What Lincoln said of the American Civil War can presumably likewise be applied to most conflicts, in which each side believes (or at least hopes) God is on their side and will grant their prayers in preference to those of their enemies. In most actual conflicts, however, there is little obvious reason to suppose that the advancement of one or the other side's political interests is also automatically God's will. More often than not in history, as Lincoln observed, the prayers of neither side get answered fully.

History, however, does suggest one apparent exception, one famous instance in which God did seem to favor one side in a war. That was when Saint Joan of Arc (c.1412-1431), whose feast day in the Church calendar is today, the 590th anniversary of her execution, responded to revelations she had received from various "voices" and led the French armies to important victories over the English during the Hundred Years' War and secured the coronation of King Charles VII. I know of no reason why God should have sided with the French over the English in that conflict. But, based on the fact of Joan's canonization in 1920, one must infer that he did.

The medieval France Joan fought and died for was barely a nation state in the modern sense, but she has nonetheless become a patron of the modern French nation state. That modern French nation state in the last century and a half has lost one and then won two wars against Germany, which in the modern era had long since replaced England as France's natural enemy. Now, of course, instead of another actual state the greater threat to French nationhood may be the bureaucratic anti-democratic globalism represented, for example, by the European Union, whose spirit has shifted, as Massimo Faggioli has noted, "away from its origins, which were inspired in part by Catholic social teaching, and toward the technocracy of the neoliberal age" (The Liminal Papacy of Pope Francis: Moving toward Global Catholicity, Orbis, 2021, p. 25). 

Ultimately, the problem with invoking Saint Joan today against any real or imagined national enemies, as some may seek to do, resides in the reality of those same "Voices" that inspired her. Without her supernatural inspiration, even a nation becomes just one more temporary political cause. It may be good. It may be bad. It may, more likely, be some mixture of both. But it will always be temporary.

(Photo: Drawing of Joan of Arc by Clément de Fauquembergue, dated 10 May 1429. This is the only known contemporary representation of Joan, although the artist never actually saw her.)

The Wrong of Rights (The Book)

Thirty years ago, Mary Ann Glendon wrote: “discourse about rights has become the principal language that we use in public to discuss weighty questions of right and wrong, but time and again it proves inadequate, or leads to a standoff of one right against another” (Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse, NY: The Free Press, 1991). Our American obsession with individual rights and the anti-social and anti-political impact of our American addiction to rights-language has been an ongoing preoccupation of mine at least since back when I was in academia. Deplorable decisions like Roe v. Wade (1973), DC v. Heller (2008), and Citizens United v FEC (2010) represent a malignant trio of dubious decisions, which have in common the Court's creation of questionable constitutional "rights," which have their basis not so much in anything in the constitution as in contemporary political ideologies. Such cases have not only done enormous damage to our society and our politics, they have also contributed to the judiciary having become ry having be the Court's undesirable status as our political system's "most dangerous branch" - to borrow the title of The Most Dangerous Branch David Kaplan's insightful 2018 book.

Now, Columbia University legal scholar Jamal Greene has further enlightened this discussion of what he calls "rightsism" in How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession with Rights Is Tearing America Apart (Houghton Mifflin, 2021). For Greene, our exaggerated rights regime highlights "a common but unrecognized problem in American law: in striving to take rights seriously, we take them too literally. We believe that holding a right means getting a judge to let us do whatever the right protects. ... But in a modern, cosmopolitan society, rights are not few and precious. They are many and ubiquitous."

If the problem of the 20th century was (as W.e.B. DuBois said) the color-line, that of the 21st century, Greene says, is the right-line. "Our opponent in the rights conflict becomes not simply a fellow citizen who disagrees with us, but an enemy out to destroy us. Law becomes reducible to winners and losers, to which side you are on, which tribe you affiliate with. With stakes this high, polarization should not just be expected but is indeed the only sensible response." In contrast, Greene, proposes "a strategy of rights mediation," in which U.S. courts should "recognize more rights, but weakly. In determining that someone holds a constitutional right, judges should be more generous, more respectful of the differences among us, of the idiosyncrasies of our personal values and commitments. But that same respect should lead judges to be more discerning in deciding how far my right goes as it comes predictably into conflict with the rights of others." This "would mean shifting our collective emphasis from whether the Constitution includes particular rights to what the government is actually doing to people and why."

Greene goes back to the American founding and recalls that the framers were less interested in protecting minorities' "rights" (as we tend to treat the matter today) than in protecting the majority from factional or executive tyranny and state and local autonomy from federal interference. For various reasons that had to change and did, but in a way which has become unsustainable today.

The peculiarly absolutist way rights jurisprudence has developed in the U.S. (in conspicuous contrast, for example, to Canada or Germany) had frustrated the very purpose and possibilities of politics. "The purpose of politics is to negotiate over disagreement. The purpose of law is to set the ground rules for that negotiation. But negotiation requires that each side have leverage. The American approach to rights conflicts makes that impossible." 

It also increases political polarization and alienation. "Treating a rights conflict as a question of who has rights and who doesn’t degrades our relationship to the law and to each other. By denying the loser any claim of rights, the court tells him not just that he has lost but that he does not matter. Although the loser’s interests and projects remain important—perhaps even essential—to him, he is made an outsider to the law. He may become suspicious of political institutions. He may choose to participate in civic life sparsely or even subversively." 

For those unfamiliar with the history of the American Revolution and the Bill of Rights, Green offers a crash course - quite different from the popular version being promoted today. So, for example, whereas the currently fashionable view is to view the first amendment as protecting individuals form religion, Greene shows how its original purpose was to protect religion (in the form of state and local churches) from federal interference. As for the novel view that the second amendment was about protecting an individual gun right, Greene recognizes that ads "rubbish." His treatment of keep constitutional cases over the course of American history highlights the high price we as a society are paying for our increasing ignorance of even basic American history.

Ultimately what Greene proposes is not the obviously unrealistic alternative of no rights, but "a better way to think about rights. Embraced and practiced successfully the world over, it’s an approach that, by encouraging decision-makers to mediate rather than discriminate among rights, by emphasizing mutual respect for multiple and competing values and commitments, brings rights closer to justice and aspires to bring us closer to each other. The suggestions offered for how courts should address three trenchant conflicts in particular—over disability rights, affirmative action, and campus speech—are invitations, not manifestos, in the spirit of humility to which we all should aspire. I don’t have all the answers to these challenges, and neither do judges."

An Overlooked English Martyr

I recently rewatched "on-demand" the two seasons (2019 and 2020) of the STARZ series, The Spanish Princess, based on Philippa Gregory's fictionalized version of the familiar story of Henry VIII's unlucky first wife, Catherine of Aragon. It is a sequel to two previous series: The White Queen about Henry's maternal grandmother, Queen Elizabeth Woodville (ancestress of all English monarchs since Henry VIII and all Scottish monarchs since James V), and The White Princess about Henry's mother Queen Elizabeth of York. Apart from the absurdly ahistorical and contrived ending to the second season of The Spanish Princess, its intertwined stories of Catherine, her (fictionalized composite character) lady-in-waiting Lina de Cardonnes, and Catherine's sister-in-law, Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scotland, and their families are all superbly portrayed. But the character I find most interesting is the tragic Yorkist Princess Margaret Pole ("Aunt Maggie"). She was devoted to Henry VIII's older brother Prince Arthur whose household she and her husband managed. But her life and relationship to the Tudor dynasty (including her Yorkist cousin Queen Elizabeth) had been forever damaged by the execution in 1499 of her (probably mentally defective) brother Edmund, then the last legitimate male representative of the Yorkist line, as part of the cost of securing the usurper Tudor line and to make possible Arthur's and Catherine's wedding and the English-Spanish alliance it was meant to guarantee. "Aunt Maggie" is perfectly played by Laura Carmichael, who as Downton Abbey's Lady Edith certainly knows something about playing a privileged character with lots of bad luck. 

The real "Aunt Maggie," Margaret Plantagenet (1473-1541), was daughter of Edward IV's and Richard III's traitor brother George, Duke of Clarence. Margaret was married off in 1487 to King Henry's cousin, Sir Richard Pole, whom she loved and with whom she was apparently happy, but who died in 1505 leaving her a poor widow with five children. Richard Pole had been Chamberlain for Henry's first son, Arthur, and 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. After Henry VIII's accession, he made her Countess of Salisbury in her own right. She was very wealthy and prominent, and King Henry supposedly considered her the saintliest woman int he kingdom. Her son Reginald Pole entered the Church but served on the continent, thereby avoiding Henry's Reformation, eventually eventually returning, during Mary Tudor's Catholic restoration, as a Cardinal and Archbishop of Canterbury - the last Catholic Archbishop in that long line.  His opposition to Henry's religious policy led him to send the King his treatise, Pro ecclesiasicae unitatis defensione.  Margaret's and her son's fidelity to the Catholic faith (and their potential claim as surviving Yorkist heirs to the English throne) eventually caused Henry VIII, England's 16h-century anticipation of Stalin, to imprison her in the Tower in her old age, where she was eventually executed 480 years ago today on May 27, 1541. Her son, Cardinal Pole, subsequently said he would "never fear to call himself the son of a martyr." In 1886, Margaret she was duly beatified by Pope Leo XIII. May 28 is the date assigned for Blessed Margaret Pole's liturgical commemoration.

Margaret was but one of many martyrs of Henry's Reformation, of whom the most famous was, of course, Saint Thomas More (portrayed in the series as Margaret's friend and tutor to her son, the future Cardinal). But, of the multitude of English martyrs of the Reformation, the often overlooked martyr Margaret lived a life that dramatically encompassed all the complex factors and conflicting interests of that era that pushed and pulled people in so. many different direction and played such a significant part in that tragic (but hardly inevitable) chain of events, which - together with the dangerous combination of despotic power and narcissistic self-absorption in Henry himself - brought about the tragic accident that became the English Reformation. 

A Fierce Family Fight for a Very Vacant Throne

According to Article 2 of the Sardinian Statuto Albertino of 1948, which served as the Constitution of the Kingdom of Italy from 1861 through 1946, succession to the throne is hereditary according to the so-called "Salic Law." (Il Trono è ereditario secondo la legge salica.) In other words, the thousand-year old House of Savoy, which provided modern Italy its four kings, followed what is called agnatic primogeniture, by which succession is hereditary among male heirs, excluding all female descendants. The present Pretender to the vacant Italian throne, Vittorio Emmanuele di Savoia (b. 1937), who would be Vittorio Emmanuele IV if he were actually king, is the only son of Italy's last reigning king, Umberto II (1904-1983), who reigned for one month in 1946. Since only male heirs could claim the crown, Vittorio Emmanuele and later his only son, Prince Emmanuele Filiberto (b. 1972) - but not Vittorio Emmanuele's three sisters - were permanently exiled from Italy by the 1948 Constitution, until that provision was repealed in 2002.

Since the republican Constitution exiled only the two ex-Kings and their Queens (King Vittorio Emmanuele III and Queen Elena and King Umberto II and Queen Marie-Jose) and their male descendants, the exile never applied to the cadet branch of the family, descended from Vittorio Emmanuele II's second son, Amedeo, 1st Duke of Aosta (1845-1890), whose great-grandson Amedeo, the 5th Duke of Aosta (b. 1943) lives in Italy and is, in theory, the heir presumptive after Emmanuele Filiberto, who has two daughters but no son. So, if the traditional order of succession were to be followed, assuming Emmanuele Filiberto has no son in his old age, his successor as Pretender would be Amedeo, or, after him, Amedeo's own son, Prince Aimone, Duke of Apulia (b. 1967). 

Meanwhile, however, Prince Vittorio Emmanuele, has decreed an amendment to the law of succession, designating his 17-year-old granddaughter Princess Vittoria, whom the NY Times describes as "a burgeoning Instagram influencer" (whatever that is) as heiress presumptive after her father Prince Emmanuele Filiberto (cf. Jason Horowitz, "Paris Teenager's New Gig: Would-Be Queen of Italy"). 

Unsurprisingly, the Aosta branch has objected and perhaps reasonably so, since there exists no mechanism to alter the constitutions and dynastic statutes that govern deposed royal families. In contrast, when, for example, Denmark decided to allow women to succeed to its throne in 1953, it changed its constitution, and so Denmark currently has a Queen - Margrethe II. Since then, Sweden (1980), the Netherlands (1983), Norway (1990), Belgium (1991), Denmark (2009), Luxembourg (2011) and the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth Realms (2011) have revised their succession laws even more radically, adopting what is called absolute primogeniture, according to which the oldest heir inherits regardless of sex. But deposed dynasties have no such option obviously available to them.

The senior and junior branches of the House of Savoy have not always gotten along. Famously, on May 21, 2004, following a dinner at Madrid's Zarzuela Palace on the eve of the wedding of the present King of Spain, Vittorio Emanuele punched his third cousin Amedeo in the face, causing him to fall down the steps, which reportedly caused Spain's then-King Juan Carlos to say that "never again" would he permit such an abuse of his hospitality. Then, in 2006, Amedeo declared himself to be Duke of Savoia and Head of the Royal House, claiming that Vittorio Emmanuele had forfeited his dynastic status in 1971 when he married without the authorization of his father, ex-King Umberto, something which had historically been a requirement. This has since divided Italian monarchists, some of whom still support the last king's son, Vittorio Emmanuele, others of whom have transferred their loyalty to Amedeo. 

One wonders whether this latest unilateral move on the part of the senior branch of the family to alter the law of succession is just another move in that longstanding feud, one which will guarantee its continuance into future generations. Without this provocation, the feud would presumably continue into the next generation, but would then resolve itself when the males of the senior Savoia line died out, to be replaced in right order by the Savoia-Aosta branch. Such things have often happened in history. (Thus, when the Comte de Chambord died in 1883, the claim to the vacant French throne passed without qualification to the rival Orleanist branch of the Bourbon  family, represented now by the Comte de Paris.)

All this squabbling, of course, can only highlight the less than illustrious modern history of an ancient and venerable dynasty, one once known, among other things, also for its piety (and its custodianship of the famous Shroud of Turin from 1453 until ex-King Umberto's death in 1983, when he willed it to the Holy See). In fact, at least two modern Savoia women are now Servants of God - Vittorio Emmanuele II's daughter, Princess Maria Clotilde (1843-1911) and Vittorio Emmanuele III's wife, Queen Elena (1873-1952). Indeed, had he had the chance, it is widely believed that Umberto II would have become an exemplary king, who would have served Italy well, perhaps better than the uninspiring Republic that replaced him. His stature, however, has not successfully been passed down to his heirs.

As a result, many, maybe most Italians may not feel much reason to miss the dynasty that not so long ago successfully created a modern and unified Italy.