25 Years

 

Church bells will ring throughout the city tomorrow morning at 8:46 a.m. to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attack on New York, Washington, DC, and, by extension, the entire United States. That time - 8:46 a.m. - corresponds to the exact moment when the World Trade Center's North Tower was struck, a moment and a day which (as the saying goes) "will live in infamy." Tomorrow, as on each of these 25 somber anniversaries, the names of the almost 3000 people who lost their lives in that attack will be read out loud. Meanwhile, our own recollections inevitably turn to that terrible day 25 years ago, a day still marked in memory, so terrible to remember that it lacks even a name and is known only by its numerical date, 9/11.

On September 11, 2001, I was next door at the time of the attack, casting my vote in the NY Democratic party primary, preparing to nominate candidates eager to run for mayor to replace the then unpopular, lame-duck incumbent. It was an inadvertent coincidence, but it remains a reminder that it was our distinctively American constitutional democratic order that was attacked on that terrible day, that the American constitutional democratic order is still very much in jeopardy (albeit in different ways and maybe more from domestic rather than foreign threats), and that the defense of this exceptional constitutional democratic order is an ongoing responsibility which we dare not shirk.

It was a absolutely beautiful late-summer morning. Many of us who were here in New York then remember how the sunny serenity of an that beautiful late summer New York City morning was suddenly transformed into an experience of horror beyond anything most of us had ever imagined we’d see so close to home. And how quickly, everything changed! Our country and our city were being suddenly and savagely attacked, and we all got to see the ugly face of evil in a way my generation had hardly really experienced it before.

 

Soon, even the corner Starbucks shut down, as police barricades went up, closing our street to regular traffic. For days that stretched into weeks, we went around in a daze, past lowered flags, past churches and firehouses draped in black, past posted pictures of missing persons who would never be found, staring at the vacant place in the skyline, as military jets patrolled the now grimly gray, but otherwise empty sky. We watched over and over again as TV told and retold the story, punctuated by occasional accounts of heroic courage and poignantly loving final conversations – powerful lessons not just about how to face death, but how to live a life that makes sense.

 

We still remember – and mourn – those whose lives were wickedly cut short on that day of terror. Our ability to remember one another is one of the things that makes us most distinctly human. When we remember those who have died, we acknowledge our common humanity with them. And we also recognize our continued relationship. Remembering the dead is a fundamental and universal human need, which we neglect at our peril. (Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have said that, to understand a community, one should visit their cemetery.)

From earliest times (and down to today in the Church’s daily prayer and in every Mass), the Church also has honored the memory of the dead and offered prayers on their behalf. Saint Monica famously said to her son Saint Augustine: “I ask only this of you, that you remember me at the altar of the Lord, wherever you may be.” So, besides being a fundamental and universal human need, remembering the dead is also a religious duty, that expresses our faith and our hope.

Meanwhile, of course, life goes on. The events of that tragic day continue to take their toll in lives, as many have sickened as a result of their exposure to toxins on that day. It is estimated that maybe more have died since then as a result than were killed on that day itself. At the same time, the world, with its seemingly intractable social and political problems and conflicts continues to challenge us. Both international politics and domestic politics have changed immeasurably in these 25 years. We have lost the brief and seemingly ephemeral sense of unity of purpose which characterized our response to that tragedy, We remember September 11, 2001, as individuals each bringing his or her own worries, fears, and hopes, and also as citizens collectively concerned for the security of our country, conscious – as world events continue to remind us – of how perilous life can be and how fragile the network of social bonds on which we depend for our survival. 

Violent attacks upon our country and our constitutional way of life have tragically punctuated our history, in each case requiring a response sufficient to restore our sense of national purpose. A proponent of unity and reconciliation in service of the American Dream, Abraham Lincoln famously ended his First Inaugural, in which he had called out the specific threats the nation faced with entreated from those who had also rejected the constitution the rule of law, and the will of the people in elections, with this entreaty: We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

That appeal fell on deaf ears then. 

What might we hope for now in our politically polarized place and time?

Labor Day

 

When I was growing up back in the Bronx in America’s post-war Golden Age, I loved Labor Day, because it meant back to school. I was a nerdy kid, who loved to read, and loved to learn new things. Of course, that was not a fashionable view, so even then I learned the social imperative to conceal one's real feelings. Years later, as a grad student, I dreaded Labor Day because the University library would close the whole weekend for its annual sprucing up before the start of school. In those days, when so few places were air-conditioned, that meant not only no place to read, study, and socialize, but also no place to keep cool and to breathe pollen-free air. 

Labor Day has been a federal holiday since 1894, but it long ago joined most of our other national holidays in losing much of its original civic significance to become just a "holiday weekend" – an opportunity for shopping and other diversions. Even when the American labor movement was still strong and the traditional Labor Day Parade still defined New York’s Union Square, Labor Day was already becoming as much about the end of summer vacation, the last day for women to wear their white shoes and men their straw hats - and less of a serious civic celebration of American workers (and the affluence their astounding productivity had helped to produce).

That great post-World War II quarter century or so of unprecedented, nation-wide, across-the-board prosperity and a strong labor movement seems such a distant memory now in the present era of increasing economic inequality. Millions of Americans now suffer from unemployment, or underemployment, or are working but living in poverty as their basic needs too often go unmet, a situation that we should recognize represents a serious economic and moral failure for our nation. Certainly, one dimension of this failure is our diminished appreciation of the importance of productive work for a fulfilling human life and a flourishing economy. Work is more than just paying the bills. It’s how we realize our potential as productive people and active citizens, and contribute to the common good.

 

The Evangelist Matthew tells us that when Jesus came home to Nazareth, the hometown crowd dismissed him as “the carpenter’s son” [Matthew 13:55]. The context suggests it was familiarity with him a someone ordinary that most upset the people. In thus dismissing the ordinary workman in their midst, however, the Nazarenes missed out on the opportunity of a lifetime.

Today, we are surrounded by workers, whose omnipresence and familiarity make them almost invisible, out of sight, out of mind – the health-care workers who care for our increasingly elderly population, the nannies who watch over the next generation, the drivers and cyclists who do all the deliveries that make our extravagant consumer lifestyle so easy. That so many members of today’s working class are immigrants - that we need to find them from somewhere else -  only highlights how essential they are, while making them that much more vulnerable.

And now, even the educated classes – previously so privileged – feel more and more like proletarians. Soon they may be unemployed, overeducated proletarians, if runaway AI technology continues to have its way. Progress – that most unchristian of concepts – is rapidly rendering obsolete so much of what used to be taken for granted. All of which only makes it that much more urgent to recover an authentic understanding of human nature and human solidarity – and of fulfilling human labor as an essential component of a good life and a good society.

Homily for Labor Day, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, September 7, 2026.

(Photo: The first Labor Day Parade, New York, September 5, 1882, 

https://barbarasbookstores.com/the-first-labor-day-parade/)

"Come with Your Brothers into the Choir"

 

I don’t typically read “The Ethicist” column in the Sunday NY Times magazine. Sometimes, however, the moral dilemmas are common enough and relatable enough that I find the column somwhat more interesting. For example, one column a couple of weeks ago addressed the increasingly common problem of families fighting and refusing to remain in contact because of differences over politics and related cultural concerns. Of course, people have always disagreed about politics; but, until not that long ago, that would not usually have been seen as a reason to break off contact with someone.

In this particular case, the supposed ethical expert made what I thought were two particularly important points. The first is that family estrangement of this sort “has become sadly familiar over the past decade or so. The strategy of severing all ties with one’s parents has been encouraged by certain high-profile therapists,” supported by social media. Also “therapeutic culture has tended to expand, sometimes recklessly,” conflating complaints that “can arise from genuinely damaging relationships,” with descriptions of “ordinary parental shortcoming.” The second is that if you don’t want to be the reconciler/mediator, that is your choice, but that it may be worth the effort, “your participation might assist people you love in reaching some kind of resolution with one another.” It might, he says, somewhat pessimistically, because what he calls “No-contact culture” is resistant “to almost every effort at reconciliation.”

All this seemed especially on point as I was reflecting on today’s Gospel reading [Matthew 18:15-20], in which Jesus addresses the problem of conflict within the Church community and how to deal with it. Jesus doesn’t pretend, as religious people sometimes try to do, that there will never be conflicts. Conflict characterized the very first human family - Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel – and political and legal procedures to resolve conflicts, which might otherwise descend into endless cycles of violence, revenge, and vendettas, have been a cornerstone of civilized life.

 

It is, however, a very specific sort of “due process” that Jesus proposes – religious rather than secular, but also communitarian rather than individualistic and oriented toward reconciliation rather than legal justice, material compensation, or personal punishment.

Obsessed as we all are in our individualistic society with personal rights, when we speak of “due process” typically what get emphasized are legal guarantees for the individuals involved. The “due process,” which Jesus outlines, focuses less on the individuals and their rights or sensitivities and more on the community. And, most importantly, it is a process aimed not at vindication and separation but at reconciliation and reincorporation into the community.

In that regard, it reminds me of the process in Church law for dealing with problematic people in religious communities. The person is warned and given a chance to change course several times before the process ends in expulsion. That’s because the goal of the process is not expulsion but rather the person’s reconciliation with the community. Expulsion may end up being necessary, but always only as a last resort - as it is in the process Jesus outlines in today’s Gospel, in which only after three tries – individually, in a small group, and finally involving the whole community – is the person expelled.

Even so, the story doesn’t quite end there. The excommunication which Jesus outlines is specified as: If he refuses to listen even to the church, then treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector.

Now, in the ordinary world, the meaning of that would have been perfectly clear. As much as possible, devout, observant Jews avoided undue contact with such people, and they probably would generally avoid admitting them into their homes and sharing meals with them. That served a certain purpose in that society, just as judicial proceedings and imprisonment do in our society.

Yet, when Jesus says treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector, he may be muddying the waters a bit, because, of course, we can all recall how Jesus himself sometimes treated Gentiles and tax collectors. Such people may indeed be outside the community, and that may be because of their own bad behavior, but they’re not forgotten. In the divided, highly conflicted North African Church of the fourth century, Saint Augustine (354-430), speaking of the heretical and schismatic Donatist Christians he had to oppose so vigorously, famously said: “My friends, we must grieve over these as over our brothers. Whether they like it or not, they are our brothers” [Commentary on Psalm 32 (33)].

 

For years, I was a fan of medieval mystery stories, like Ellis Peters’ 20 Brother Cadfael Mysteries (set in 12th-century Shrewsbury).  In these mysteries, Brother Cadfael - over and above his avocation as an amateur but very effective detective - is, first and foremost, a Benedictine monk. But, In the 20th and final Brother Cadfael book, called Brother Cadfael’s Penance, Cadfael has, sadly, broken his vow of obedience. But then, at the end of the story, he returns to the monastery and kneels before his Abbot, and the Abbot simply responds: “Get up now, and come with your brothers into the choir.”

 

Unlike Cadfael and his brother monks, we live in a conflict-obsessed society driven by social media and what some, on both sides of the political divide, have taken to calling “cancel culture.” Clearly, we cannot be unaffected by all the vitriolic conflict that surrounds us. Yet, whatever we are or do as a community of disciples, our goal can never simply be to cancel one another. Rather, it must always be to bring us all back together, so that we may eventually all be together, here and now at this altar, and forever in God’s kingdom.

Homily for the 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, September 6, 2026.

The Great

Today, the Church commemorates Pope Saint Gregory the Great, who was Pope from September 3, 590, until his death on March 12, 604. He is one of only two Popes officially entitled "the Great" - the other being Pope Saint Leo the Great, who was Pope from 440 to 461. He is also one of the four great Latin Doctors of the Church - along with Saint Ambrose (c.340-397), Saint Jerome (c.343-420), and Saint Augustine (354-430).

Gregory was born into a wealthy noble Roman family. His father was a patrician, a senator, and prefect of the city, which last post Gregory himself also held as a young man. After his father's death, he converted his family home into a monastery and became a monk there himself. His monastic life was interrupted when for several years he served as the Pope's Ambassador to the Emperor in Constantinople and then was permanently interrupted when he was elected Pope himself. He was the first pope to adopt the title "Servant of the Servants of God." To improve social services in the city, he organized the resources of the Church introducing an early form of basic accounting. In his liturgical reforms, he famously moved the Our Father to its present position right after the Eucharistic Prayer. The Church's official form of chant also bears his name. He wrote extensively. Many of his sermons and over 850 of his letters survive.

Gregory had a strong a strong missionary commitment and is credited with re-energizing the Church's missionary work among the non-Christian peoples of northern Europe. He is most famous for sending Saint Augustine, who had succeeded him in charge of his Roman monastery, to evangelize the Anglo-Saxons, who had conquered much of what is now England. Roman Britain had, of course, had a Christian community, based in London, but that older Roman British Celtic Christianity was by then largely confined to the west (Wales).   It was from there that Saint Patrick had earlier emerged to evangelize Ireland. But it was Gregory who undertook the evangelization of Anglo-Saxon England, sending Saint Augustine who established his See at Canterbury. 

Gregory wrote to Augustine:   "Almighty God places good men in authority that he may impart through them the gifts of his mercy to their subjects. And this we find to be the case with the British over whom you have been appointed, that through the blessings bestowed on you the blessings of heaven might be bestowed on your people also." Gregory's outreach to England was so successful that English missionaries also in turn evangelized much of what is now Germany. Ultimately, the Church in the English-speaking world is his great legacy, as the English-speaking world has been the beneficiary of Gregory the Great's outward-looking missionary zeal.

Homily for the Commemoration of Pope Saint Gregory the Great, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, September 3, 2026.

Photo: Altar of Saint Gregory the Great in Saint Peter's Basilica, Rome, where Saint Gregory is buried.

Reading the Aeneid

 

I sing of arms and of a man displaced                                                                                          by Fate, the first to leave the coast of Troy                                                                                    for Italy and its Lavinian shores:                                                                                                  the power of the gods and vicious wrath                                                                                      of unforgetting Juno hurled him far                                                                                            across the sea and lands, and he endured                                                                                    still further pain in war - the price to found                                                                                    his city and install his gods in Latium.                                                                                      The Latin race, the Alban lords, the walls                                                                                   of soaring Rome: from here they all began.

Virgil, Aeneid (Book 1, 1-10).

Homer's Odyssey is everywhere right now, thanks to Christopher Nolan's entertaining - if also problematic - portrayal of it on screen this summer. I first read the Odyssey in high school; the Iliad later. Until this week, however, I had never actually read Virgil's venerable Latin classic, the Aeneid, his late first-century B.C. account of the Trojan prince Aeneas' escape from the calamity of the Trojan War's end and his Odyssey-like journey across the Mediterranean, harassed by the vengeful goddess Juno, until he eventually settled in Italy and became the putative ancestor of the Romans. Being about Rome and having been written in Latin, Virgil's Aeneid may have been the most influential literary work of all the Greek and Roman classics.I knew about the Aeneid, of course, but it remained among the many classics which one ought to know something about without ever actually getting around to reading it. 

Once upon a time, however, the world was very different, and the Virgil-Homer hierarchy was reversed. As Bryn Mawr classicist Catherine Conybeare has noted, Latin-speaking Roman schoolboys "learned to read by sounding out syllables from the Aeneid. The Aeneid taught them to scan lines of poetry, and moreover to interpret them. Children learned swaths of the poem by heart. Later on boys would begin the rhetorical studies on which an imperial career was based by entering imaginatively into the characters from the Aeneid and composing appropriate speeches for them to declaim at crucial moments of choice or crisis. Wherever in the empire their careers took these young men, an apposite quotation form the Aeneid thrown casually into their conversation or their correspondence would immediately establish them as a member of the educated ruling classes" [Augustine the African, Norton, Liveright, 2025, p. 5].

Having been energized by all the renewed classical hype engendered by Christopher Nolan's on-screen Odyssey this summer, I have - with somewhat surprising enthusiasm - returned to the sources, the Iliad itself and the Odyssey itself (albeit in English translations), and I now find myself emboldened to tackle Virgil's Roman-centric sequel - in the 2025 translation by Scott McGil and Susannah Wright (Norton Liveright), which includes a superb Introduction by the famous Homeric translator Emily Wilson. (All references here are to that translation.)

The Aeneid - 9,896 Latin lines written (like the Iliad and the Odyssey) in dactylic hexameter - was composed by Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) in the last decade of his life (29-29 B.C.) It is thought that the poem may have actually been left unfinished - as evidenced by the presence of several metrically incomplete verses. Virgil's hero, Aeneas, was already familiar from the Iliad as a Trojan prince and a son of Aphrodite (Venus). The first six of Aeneid's twelve books recount the story of Aeneas' Odyssey-like wandering from Troy to Italy, including in Book 2 Virgil's violent account of the actual fall of Troy, a grief no words can tell (2.4), returning the reader to the blood-soaked, heroic world of the Iliad. The remaining six books recount the Trojans' ultimately victorious Iliad-like wars with the Latins, with whose name and language Aeneas and his Trojan followers have been destined to assimilate. The poem served as a founding myth for the city (and later empire) of Rome, connecting Rome back to the heroic age of Troy and promoting the legitimate rule of the Julian dynasty as the descendants of the goddess Venus and the Trojan hero Aeneas. Already, almost at the poem's beginning, notwithstanding Juno's hostility, Jupiter had promised Venus, Aeneas' mother, regarding his descendants: I set no bounds of space or time for them; I have bestowed dominion without end (1. 332-333).

Juno's hostility, however, is a constant reminder that with Virgil (as with Homer, who had Odysseus forever afflicted by Poseidon's wrath), we are in a very different moral universe from our own. We are in a world of capricious gods and goddesses, who exercise control over human affairs in unpredictable ways and who can sometimes be appeased but sometimes not. As Virgil himself expressed it, what offense, what painful insult led the queen of heaven to drive a man renowned for faithfulness through such ordeals, such endless miseries? Do gods have so much anger in their hearts? (1. 11-15).

Nor are the gods alone when it comes to complex and intense emotions!

"Hector fights for his country. Achilles fights only for himself." So said Agamemnon in the 2004 film Troy. As Hector's tear-inducing farewell conversation with his wife in Book 6 of the actual Iliad illustrates, Hector was not immune from Bronze Age heroic vainglory akin to that of Achilles, but neither was the movie version of Agamemnon all that wrong in the important personal differences which Agamemnon noted between the two heroes. Ascribed ancestry aside, this was undoubtedly another reason why the civic-minded Romans would have wanted to identify themselves with the Trojan cause and would have taken pride in their supposed Trojan ancestor, Aeneas. And, unlike Achilles or Odysseus, Aeneas' most outstanding trait is not some manifestation of physical or mental superiority but his piety. This too would appeal strongly to the Romans, because piety highlights the hero's relationship with and devotion to both the gods and the hero's human communities (e.g., family and city). Unlike the Greeks', the unique artistry of the Romans was political - as foretold by the ghost of Aeneas' father, Anchises, in Book 6: Remember, Roman, to rule the world (for these will be your arts) and to impose on it an ordered peace (6. 1023-1026). Of course, it would be precisely this passage - reimagined as arrogance - which Saint Augustine would later directly attack in his de-mystification of Roman imperialism in his monumental anti-Aeneid, The City of God!

There is, of course, quite a cost in human terms to dominion without end, to which the women characters - whether Andromache in the Iliad or Dido in the Aeneid - are especially poignant witnesses. Interestingly, the Iliad, dominated by Achilles' seemingly unquenchable rage and filled with destructive battle-after-battle, ends on a humane note as an angry Achilles shows mercy to Priam, Hector's grieving father. In the Aeneid, however, Aeneas in his fury considers but then rejects Turnus' plea for mercy, and the poem ends in violent death - a fitting foreshadowing, perhaps, of the enormous human cost to be exacted in producing the Augustan pax romana, the high price to be paid for empire. He burned with anger as he plunged his blade into his rival's breast. The chill of death made Turnus' limbs go slack, and with a groan, his spirit fled in protest to the shades (12. 1142-1145).