Lent

 

There is no island, no continent, no city or nation, no distant corner of the globe, where the proclamation of Lenten Fast is not listened to. Armies on the march and travelers on the road, sailors as well as merchants, all alike hear the announcement and receive it with joy. Let no one then separate himself from the number of those fasting, in which every race of humankind, every period of life, every class of society is included.

So said Saint Basil the Great (330-379) preaching about the arrival of Lent in the 4th century. The triumphalist universality of Basil's account obviously no longer describes our contemporary reality in our more globalized and hence more multi-culturally conscious world. It barely even describes what is left of Lent in what remains of the Christian world. But Lent (or, at least, Ash Wednesday) remains one of the most recognized and observed occasions in the Christian calendar, even in our supposedly secularized society.

While Lent (or, at least Ash Wednesday) remains immensely popular, the question remains, why Lent?  There are many pious practices associated with Lent - notably fasting, prayer, and acts of charity. These, of course, are meant as means to an end. Lent and its traditional practices are our means of deepening our relationship with God and consciously and deliberately re-orienting all aspects of our lives accordingly. Our Lenten fasting, our increased prayer, our acts of individual and collective charity all express God's grace at work with in us and open us to ever more grace, to the fullness of life that is our destiny, as we seek through our actions here and now to become the persons we shall be for all eternity.

Lent has its origins in the final preparation of catechumens for baptism and membership in the Church and of penitents for reconciliation with God and the Church. Even prior to the modern 20th-century restoration of the catechumenate, the Lenten liturgy reflected both of these themes, as it continues to do. During Lent, we identify with the catechumens in their journey of conversion and express it in our own individual and communal journey of reconciliation with God and with one another.

Lent, as Pope Leo has written in his first lenten message, "is a time in which the Church, guided by a sense of maternal care, invites us to place the mystery of God back in the center of our lives, in order to find renewal in our faith and keep our hearts from being consumed by the anxieties and distractions of daily life. "

We live in a therapeutic age which prizes comfort and feeling good about ourselves. Yet surprisingly Ash Wednesday - with its sobering message of the reality of human limits and its solemn challenge to repent - somehow still cuts through the poisonous political platitudes and psychobabble of our self-affirmational age to speak spiritual truth against the powerful lies that envelope us.

 

Every Lent, the Church invites us to break our routine and do something we usually seem somewhat reluctant to do – to take an honest and critical look at ourselves - at where we are, where we are going, where we would like to be going, and how we hope to get there. Lent, as Pope Leo has suggested, "means allowing ourselves to be challenged by reality and recognizing what truly guides our desires — both within our ecclesial communities and as regards humanity’s thirst for justice and reconciliation."

The Indispensable Washington

 

Today is Presidents Day, a commercial distortion of an actual legal holiday, which is George Washington's Birthday. Washington's birthday was celebrated on February 22 for most of American history, until the infamous Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968 (effective in 1971) moved several federal holidays to Mondays in order to create three-day weekends for federal employees. (Washington's actual birthdate was February 11, 1731, in the British Empire which at the time still followed the Julian calendar, but it was already February 22, 1732, in most of the rest of the Western world, which had adopted the Gregorian calendar.)

Ken Burns' 2025 series The American Revolution recounts how a German in Pennsylvania labeled General Washington der Landesvater ("the Father of the country") The title stuck. First as commanding General of the Continental Army, then as first President of the United States under the Constitution, Washington has lived on as the Father of our country. Or, better yet, as future Chief Justice John Marshall celebrated him, "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen." As importantly, Ken Burns' series also calls him "the indispensable man," which indeed he was - both as commanding General of the Continental Army and then as our first President.

Washington had his weaknesses. He lost more battles than he won. And. of course, he was a wealthy, slave-owning land speculator. Recognizing all that, the consensus remains that Washignton was truly indispensable both to the success of the revolution itself and then as President indispensable to the early success of the constitutional order.

Whatever his military or other limitations, Washington was able to hold the Continent Army together, not small accomplishment given the rebels' lack of resources. He demonstrated genuine leadership is having his entire army inoculated against smallpox. And he notably displayed a commitment to religious toleration, which was far from universal among his compatriots. For example, in his September 14, 1775, orders to Benedict Arnold in preparation for the (ultimately unsuccessful) invasion of Canada, Washington insisted that Arnold (who was otherwise inclined) respect the Catholic faith of the Canadians, warning Arnold to avoid "disrespect or contempt" for the Canadians' religion, arguing that, while fighting for liberty, they must not violate the rights of conscience of others. Likewise, as President, Washington would demonstrate his respect for his Catholic and Jewish fellow citizens.

Of course, Washington's most important act as revolutionary war leader was his surrender of his commission back to the Continent Congress once the war was won. On December 23, 1783, George Washington voluntarily resigned his commission as Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army to Congress of the Confederation then meeting in Annapolis. This action, resisting what would prove irresistible a few years later to Napoleon, established the precedent of civilian control over the American military. Having eschewed potential monarchical power, Washington contentedly returned to private life at Mount Vernon.Upon hearing what Washington had done, King George III famously remarked to painter Benjamin West, "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world". 

As the first Chief Executive under the new federal constitution fro 1789 to 1797, everything Washington did set precedent for future presidents. Again, his most important precedent was his free decision to depart, not to become a President for life. On March 4, 1797, as the new nation's first ex-president, Washington walked from the Presidents House in Philadelphia to where Congress was meeting to attend - as a private citizen - the inauguration of his successor. Washington's presence highlighted the constitutional legitimacy of the inauguration of our second president - and every president since.

Washington's way of being president provided needed dignity to the new office - a dignity not all his successors have been as willing to maintain. His voluntary departure established the precedent of the peaceful transfer of power, a principle essential to free constitutional government, the practice of which principle all his successors but one have recognized as their essential final responsibility in office.

Now, maybe more than ever in our history, is Washington's example indispensable.

A Revolutionary Life

Saint Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) must surely be one of the Church's most popular saints. But 2026 has been proclaimed a Franciscan Jubilee year (commemorating the 800th anniversary of the saint's death). So even more attention may be expected to be focused on Francis this year. In this expectation, I have turned to an already quarter-century old contribution to the Francis story, Adrian House, Francis of Assisi: A Revolutionary Life (Paulist Press, 2001).

House firmly situates Francis well within the context of the medieval society he inhabited, a society so seemingly (unlike ours) in harmony with its natural surroundings, simultaneously (like ours) filled with conflicts of every kind - class conflicts, social conflicts, political conflicts, military conflicts, and, of course, religious conflicts, (both intra-religious and inter-religious). The reader encounters traditional aristocrats and peasants, as well as the rising urban bourgeoisie, especially the emerging communes in rising Italian city-states, like Assisi. The chronology is complex, as was the era being recounted, an era of big personalities like Pope Innocent III and Emperor Frederick II Stupor Mundi.

For all the secular history, however, the focus of the book remains always on one person Francis - Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone (1181-1226) - Saint Francis of Assisi, il poverello, who, having experienced a profound personal conversion and call from Christ to rebuild his Church, adopted a radically poor lifestyle in an extremely intense identification with Jesus, and then attracted thousands of followers, forming the various branches of the Franciscan religious family, which survives today.

The story of Saint Francis is always two stories. It is, first, the story of Francis himself, of his heroic effort to identify totally with Jesus in a life of extreme self-abnegation and service to others. Francis' sanctity seems to have been almost universally recognized in his own lifetime (as well as ever since), and his unique identification with Christ appeared to have been confirmed by the miracle of the stigmata, a spiritual phenomenon which was then new and unprecedented in the Church.

The second story is that of his followers, those who came to form the three orders, devoted to living according to his Rule with greater or lesser severity. There is always a temptation when telling the story of Francis to create an inherent conflict between Francis' radical following of the Gospel in extreme poverty and the Church's efforts to mitigate Francis' extremism through her compromises with the lived experience of human frailty. There is truth to this traditional trope, although of course it is also an oversimplification. House at times indulges in this oversimplified paradigm, while also recognizing its interpretive inadequacy. 

As his contemporaries recognized, Francis represented something unique, a following of Christ so intense that it merited the stigmata, and so extreme that it could only be lived fully by. him. Others - above all his fellow Franciscans - might seek to imitate him, but their imitation will likely always remain partial. But that is not the same as insincerity or falsehood, but rather a recognition of diverse human capacities and Francis' own unique gifts.

House commendably does well at navigating this complicated reality. He concedes that the "decisions to release the friars from their vow of absolute poverty, so as to sustain the momentum of their growth, and to build a monument to Francis which he never would have wanted, may have been wrong. Or, since the order still thrives and millions of people visit Assisi each year, it may have been right." Indeed, he recognizes Francis' "lasting achievement" in the lives of the Friars, the Poor Clares, and the Third Order "dedicated to the aims of the founders all over the world."

The author also desires to relate Francis' story as much as possible to more universal and non-Christian themes. While commendable, this effort seems at times strained and overdone - most especially in the distracting employment of Jungian language and imagery. That quibble conceded, this account is a fine introduction and/or rediscovery of the treasure the Church has received in the ever exciting story of Saint Francis.

(Blessed) Fulton Sheen

It's official at last! The Beatification of Archbishop Fulton Sheen (1895-1979), postponed several years ago, has finally gotten approval to move forward. “This is a great moment for the local church in Peoria, for the church here in the United States and for the church universal,” Bishop Louis Tylka of Peoria said in an interview on Monday, February 9, after he had been informed by the Holy See that Archbishop Sheen can now proceed to beatification.

Exactly 74 years ago today, on February 12, 1952, speaking from a set in the Adelphi Theater on West 54th Street in New York City, the soon-to-be Blessed Bishop Fulton J. Sheen  premiered his new TV show Life Is Worth Living. Having already hosted a radio; program for 20 years, Sheen was now breaking experimental ground in a new Roman Catholic outreach to the broader American society via the (then) very new medium of television. Sheen's show won an Emmy in 1953 (beating both Edward R. Murrow and Lucille Ball) and ran until 1957, regularly drawing as many as 30 million viewers. 

I was not one of them. My family had bought our first television in 1952, several months after Sheen's premiere performance. But my parents preferred watching Milton Berle. The first time I ever recall seeing Sheen on TV was a special show he did on the occasion of the coronation of Pope Saint John XXIII in 1958. That said, even without me and my family in the audience, Sheen's program was amazingly successful. It was the most high-profile pubic presentation of Catholic faith at the time, presenting it in a way which was resonant with the dramatically changing post-war national culture and the new style of religion that spoke to that culture. Thus, Will Herberg, in his classic Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Doubleday, 1955) famously saw Sheen as a major mediator of Roman Catholicism's new post-war status as part of "the national consensus as one of the three versions of the 'American Way of Life'."

TV was new in 1952. Sheen was not. He already had a reputation as a serious academic, a successful convert-maker, a famous preacher both in the pulpit and on NBC's weekly Sunday-night radio broadcast, The Catholic Hour. Television, however, made Sheen one of the primary representatives of American public religion. Sheen himself took particular satisfaction in how his program both improved the Church's public image and led to greater inter-religious understanding among Catholic and non-Catholic Americans. Yet, as Church Historian Mark S. Massa has noted  in Catholics and American Culture: Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, and the Notre Dame Football Team (Crossroads, 1999), "Sheen remained a committed devotee of Thomistic ultramontanism. Sheen never wavered in his firm faith that Catholicism provided the best - and very possibly the only - answer to the question of human existence." Thus, Sheen's seemingly "nondenominational 'inspirational' chats" in fact were "profoundly Catholic reflections on the cultural state of the American union," a "natural law Thomism" that "sounded not far from the up-beat, 'can do' spirituality just then claiming the American religious mainstream in books, movies, and state of the union addresses."

Likewise Conservative columnist Ross Douthat, in Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (Free Press, 2012), recalled Sheen as "a courtly and more intellectual version of Billy Graham," who like Graham was "turning the new mass media to Christian ends" and "understood his era perfectly," while arguing, as an American Catholic apologist, that the Catholic Church was "a better custodian of American values than many of its secular critics." (Graham himself once called Sheen “the greatest communicator of the 20th century.”) 

As so often happens, short-term personality conflicts trumped long-term interests, and Sheen eventually left Life Is Worth Living (and New York's most prominent pulpit) apparently as a result of opposition from New York's then very powerful Archbishop, Francis Cardinal Spellman. Sheen was famously welcomed back to Saint Patrick's pulpit by Spellman's kindly successor, Terence Cardinal Cook. And Sheen remained relatively active into his final years. I finally did get to hear him speak live in the mid-1970s when he came to preach at the Princeton University Chapel.

Sheen's beatification later this year will, first and foremost, be an acknowledgment by the Church of his reputation for heroic sanctity and his intercessory power, (On July 6, 2019, Pope Francis formally approved a miracle attributed to the Archbishop Sheen's intercession. This miracle involved the unexplained recovery of a stillborn infant, James Fulton Angstrom, in Peoria in 2010.) It also serves to remind us of the ever present need for the Church to use whatever tools an age provides to fulfill it eternal mandate to evangelize the entire human world.

After the Super Bowl

Like many (maybe most) Americans, I spent much of Sunday evening at a Super Bowl "party." Personally, I couldn't care less about football. So, like many others, I barely paid any attention to the game itself. (Even some of the football fans, who were present, proclaimed the game part of the evening to be at best boring). For most of us, the really big event was the eagerly anticipated, much hyped in advance, Apple Music Half-Time Show, featuring the super popular Puerto Rican performer and recent Grammy award winner Bad Bunny (Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio). Bad Bunny is one of the most popular - most widely streamed - musical performers in the world. Being admittedly largely out of touch in regard to much of popular music and entertainment culture, I was unfamiliar with Bad Bunny's music until recently. But, of course, I wasn't quite the target audience!

As an entertainment experience, Bad Bunny's Half-Time Show was fabulous. It was exuberant and joyful, a genuine celebration of life and togetherness (complete with a real wedding), and a glorious expression of Puerto Rican culture and music, the first Super Bowl half-Time show almost entirely in Spanish. In one sense, it was not overtly political. (Trump was never mentioned by name.) As everything has become in our conflicted current era, however, the show was inevitably political, precisely for its celebration of the diversity of American society and its evocation of the many nations that share this singular American continent, not to mention the not so subtle significance of the performing sugar cane workers climbing electrical poles!

The multi-cultural, multi-racial reality of American society is a fundamental fact which one can either celebrate or lament. Some obviously may have chosen to lament, but they are inevitably the poorer for it.  The insinuation that the performer (who is, of course, an American citizen) and the Spanish-language performance were somehow "un-American," only highlights the absurd racial exclusiveness that - to some - masquerades as American patriotism. Meanwhile, the rest of America just enjoyed the party.

Karl Marx famously called religion the heart of a heatless world, the spirit of spiritless dominions, the opiate of the people. Whatever one wants to make of Marx's infamous claim regarding religion, the opiate of the people role has long ago been assumed by football. Expanding the religion of football's reach into diverse latino markets is obviously part of the industry's business plan. Roger Goodell's very public embrace of Bad Bunny only highlighted that business plan's strategic sense. Not for the first time, however, has a narrowly shrunken exclusive distortion of the American dream been undermined the very same greedy capitalism it professes to endorse.

The Super Bowl may no longer be - if it ever really was - the great unifying patriotic event it has at times pretended to be. Neither - as was so sadly also displayed recently - is the National Prayer Breakfast.  So many of our once supposedly culturally unifying national events have lost their purported luster. 

But the universal aspirations Americans have long valued, lived, and celebrated still survive - and sing in Spanish.

Photo: Bad Bunny performs during the Super Bowl LX halftime show (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images).