31 Grace-Filled Years

 

On October 28, 212, the Roman Emperor Constantine defeated his rival at the battle of the Milvian Bridge, an event of world-historical significance for western civilization and for the future of Christianity.

Sometime in the next few centuries, October 28 became the feast of the Apostles Simon and Jude, the latter the patron of desperate situations.

Fast forward to October 28, 1886, on which day the Statue of Liberty was dedicated by U.S. President Grover Cleveland. That statue still stands on an island in New York Harbor and was the monument which greeted generations of immigrants to this country, including my four grandparents.

On October 28, 1922, Mussolini's Fascists began their "March on Rome." Two days later, King Vittorio Emmanuele III appointed Mussolini Prime Minister, and under il Duce's leadership Italy began its own tragic march to despotism, world war, and then civil war. Thanks to the U.S. 14th Amendment, my parents were already American citizens by birth, 

On October 28, 1965, the Second Vatican Council issued Nostra Aetate, the Council's "Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions," which truly transformed the Church's relationship with the modern world.

Finally, on October 28, 1995, at Saint Peter's Church, Toronto, I was ordained a priest. Compared to all of the above, that was an event little noted nor long remembered - except by me, for whom it was the fulfillment of long-delayed aspiration and the beginning of a most fulfilling ministry and life.

Celebrating my 30th anniversary last year, I recalled "an amazingly grace-filled path, punctuated by daily Masses, Sunday Masses, school Masses, Spanish Masses, Italian Masses, Wedding Masses, Funeral Masses, an amazingly grace-filled path from Toronto to New York, to Knoxville,  now back to New York: singing Christmas carols on Bloor Street and blessing Saint Anthony’s Bread, living through the soul-searing sadness of 9/11 and the welcome comfort of weekly breakfasts with parishioners at the Flame, the spiritual uplift of pilgrimages to famous shrines and a summer spent studying at Windsor Castle, the challenge of walking for miles in the pre-dawn dark at World Youth Day in Cologne, and the adventures of saint-school in Rome, then pastor of Knoxville’s historic and beautiful first parish church, and the amazing adventure of chairing meetings, paying bills, replacing a boiler, restoring the church ceiling and climbing the scaffolding to touch a century-old ceiling painting, blogging, e-mailing, and eventually even live-streaming, teaching and learning, preaching, praying with the sick, baptizing babies, burying the dead, caring for a cemetery, now doing some of the same but on a much smaller scale as superior of this wonderful community – all the time being challenged and stretched in ways I had hardly ever expected."

A year later, what more can anyone say?

Let the Church's liturgy have the final word:

For the glory of your name, O Lord, I have joyfully celebrated the mystery of faith to mark the anniversary of my priestly ordination, so that I may be in truth what I have handled mystically in this sacrifice. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. (Postcommunion Prayer, Votive Mass on the Anniversary of Ordination).

Photo: Bishop Attila Miklósházy, SJ, Bishop of Hungarian Emigrants, lays hands on me at my priestly ordination, Saint Peter's Church, Toronto, October 28, 1995.

1995 Ordination Photo and Prayer Card.

Embracing the Winter Dark

At the British royal family's private Norfolk estate, Sandringhan House, it was once the custom to set the clocks half an hour ahead - in order to provide more afternoon daylight for shooting! (This "Sandringham Time" was abolished by that iconoclastic modernizer, Edward VIII, in 1936.) Of course, the amount of daylight on any given day at any particular time of year is dictated by the sun, not by a clock, let alone by our manipulation of the clock. Playing games with the clock is a time-honored self-deception, however, first proposed by Benjamin Franklin (ostensibly to save on candles), now practiced annually in the U.S. every April ("Spring forward!") and corrected every autumn on the first Sunday of November ("Fall behind!"). The system of summer "Daylight Saving Time" was codified in the Uniform Time Act of 1966. Since then, the beginning and end of "Daylight Saving Time" have been expanded slightly at each end, thanks to the Energy Policy Act of 2005. As that title suggests, that expansion of the "Daylight Saving Time" section of the year has often been defended as an energy-saving measure - in other words, as a politically evasive alternative to adopting any actual energy policy.

Admittedly, "Daylight Saving Time" has its partisans. Congress has repeatedly debated proposals to make "Daylight Saving Time" permanent nationwide, like the Sunshine Protection Act which passed the House in July 2026. Thankfully, however, the bill was stalled in the Senate. So, the traditional twice-a-year clock change remains legally required for now. (Some also assert that the one-hour time change is dangerous to people's health. Yet, thousands of people everyday fly across one or more time zones and change their watches one or more hours without noticeable health harms!)

Despite the way it is obsessively presented, "Daylight Saving Time" does not give us an extra hour of daylight, as is so often alleged. It just reallocates the existing amount of daylight, giving us darker mornings and brighter evenings - fine for wealthy golfers but not so fine for farmers who rise for work early and schoolchildren who have to wait for the bus in dangerously dark streets. Modern society has in so many ways de-linked us from nature and our natural biological rhythms. "Daylight Saving Time" just makes it that much worse, a further de-linking of our official, social, civilizational time from natural time.

Obviously we cannot live our complicated modern lives without some standardizing of time. What is called "Standard Time," to which we will return at 2:00 a.m. Saturday night/Sunday morning, remains realistically the closest availably approximation to "natural" time and to the biological rhythms that are part of who we are as human beings.

"Daylight Saving Time" was invented in an era when humans hoped to transcend biology and to leave the constraints of the natural world behind as much as possible. That is still the unofficial ideology of modernity. Meanwhile, however, nature has begun to exact her revenge. The continuity of human civilization now requires renegotiating that relationship in a way which better respects natural limits on human hubris. Recalibrating our clocks to stay closer to natural time will not correct climate change nor solve any of our other pressing political problems. It is, however, one very modest and imperfect but still symbolic step in that direction.

In Saint Ambrose's hymn Aeterne rerum conditor, one of the hymns assigned to Sundays in the Liturgy of the Hours, we sing, You give the seasons of the year To take time's heaviness away. Rather than lament less afternoon daylight to play golf or go shopping, we would do better to learn to embrace the winter dark, with its implicit invitation to slow down and adopt a more contemplative stance to time as the planet presents it to us.

Fruitlands (The Book)

 

Fruitlands (the place) was a utopian community established in June 1843 by New England Transcendentalists Bronson Alcott (1799-1888) and Charles Lane (1800-1870) that lasted until January 1844. Lane purchased what was known as the Wyman farm and its 90 acres, which also included a dilapidated house and barn in Harvard, Massachusetts. Residents were committed to what today would be called a vegan diet, drinking only water, washing in cold water, avoiding animal labor on their farm, and communal ownership of property. The remaining historical buildings are now part of the Fruitlands Museum (which I visited in 2008).

Fruitlands (the book) is Bronson Alcott's Fruitlands, Compiled by Clara Endicott Sears, with Transcendental Wild Oats, by Louisa M. Alcott, first published in 1876, reprinted 1915 (Pantianos Classics). Fruitlands (the book) is this month's selection for our parish book club.

Unless one has a particular historical or philosophical interest in 19th-century New England Transcendentalism and its utopian community experiments at Brook Farm and its short-term unsuccessful offshoot Fruitlands, why read this book? The obvious answer (at least for our book club) is a particular youthful adherent of the Brook Farm community who joined the Fruitlands group briefly in the summer of 1843, namely Servant of God Isaac Hecker (1819-1888), who a year later abandoned transcendentalism for Roman Catholicism, and later became a priest and a famous Catholic apologist and in 1858 founded the Paulist Fathers

Hecker's own personal description of his experience of Fruitlands occupies some six pages of this book, which is a compilation of various contemporary commentaries and recollections of the Fruitlands experiment. Hecker's comments include diary entries from July-August 1843, corresponding with his actual time at Fruitlands, followed by some final comments from 1888, the year both Alcott and later Hecker himself died. The earlier comments reflect how Hecker  experienced Fruitlands and his feelings about it at the time. The end-of-life comments obviously reflect not just recollections from years long past but also his post-transcendentalist, Roman Catholic perspective and re-interpretation of his life.

In 1888, Hecker, asked about the recently deceased Alcott and how he had received Hecker at Fruitlands, responded, "Very kindly, but from mixed and selfish motives. I suspect he wanted me because he thought I would bring money to the Community. Lane was entirely unselfish." (The "money" presumably referred to the Hecker family wealth, which if Isaac had persevered at Fruiltands, might have been made available by his brothers and thus might have contributed to Fruiltands' survival - and seeming success.) Hecker acknowledged "Alcott was a man of great intellectual gifts or acquirements. His knowledge came chiefly from experiences and instinct. He had an insinuating and persuasive way with him." Alcott, however, was also, in Hecker's view, "naturally and constitutionally so odd." Hecker called Emerson, Alcott and Thoreau "three consecrated cranks."

Hecker's contemporary comments at Fruitlands were more well disposed but quite critical even then. He admired Alcott, et al., but doubted Fruiltands would fulfill his long-term needs. He was also homesick. "I have thought of my family this afternoon, and the happiness and love with which I might return to them." Eventually, he decided, "I will go home, be true to the spirit with the help of God, and wait for further light and strength." The Fruiltands community "have been the means of giving me much light on myself, but I feel I would live and progress more in a different atmosphere." After Hecker left, Alcott (according to Hecker's later-in life recollections) said "Hecker has flunked out. He hadn't the courage to persevere. He's a coward." Lane, however, replied, "No; you're mistaken. Hecker is right. He wanted more than we had to give him."

That "more" obviously was what Hecker would eventually find in the Church.

Hecker aside, Fruiltands (the book) is an often rather entertaining, occasionally comic account of the "consecrated cranks" and other unusual characters who briefly populated Fruiltands, along with the long-suffering Mrs. Alcott and her children. Ellery Channing said, "Mrs. Alcott was one of the most refined persons of my acquaintance. She told me afterwards that in 1843-44 she feared for her husband's sanity; he did such strange things without seeming to know how odd they were; wearing only linen clothes and canvas shoes, and eating only vegetables."  According to Lane, "Mr. Alcott makes such high requirements of all persons that few are likely to stay, even of his own family, unless he can become more tolerant of defect."

That last comment, by Charles Lane, summarizes the inevitably failed outcome of such secular utopian communal experiments, of which there were in fact many in the 19th century - a century which widely encouraged the post-Christian belief in human perfectibility and hence utopian possibility. (Contemporaneously, the Shakers were a religiously oriented utopian community which proved much more successful in their time - and were acknowledged as such even by the Fruiltands leadership. According to Lane, some associates, including Hecker, "visited the Shakers and were much attracted by them.")

The community at Fruitlands lasted seven months. It was dependent on farming, which turned out to be too difficult. Fruitlands quotes a certain Mr. Sanborn's Memoirs of Bronson Alcott, "A lack of organizing power to control the steady current of selfishness, as well as the unselfish vagaries of his [Alcott's] followers, was the real cause. Nothing in fact could be more miserable than the failure of this hopeful experiment."

Hecker, for one, went on soon to find something so much better, more long-lasting, more true to authentic human aspirations, while fully aware of human limits.

God and Caesar

“Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God." An appropriate Gospel to hear, just weeks before a national election! A sobering Gospel, given religion’s increasing subordination to politics in American society! A confusing Gospel, given that it leaves unspecified exactly what belongs to God and what to Caesar!

 

As another election approaches, we are all aware of the many challenging and difficult issues facing our country, along with the contentious and acrimonious arguments that increasingly characterize campaigns and dominate national news. Disagreement and debate are natural and appropriate in a free society. That is how we choose among competing candidates and their policies and so provide for the peaceful transfer of political power to those we designate to govern our country according to the political, cultural, and moral values which we express in our votes.

 

As committed Catholic Christians, we also share with our fellow citizens in the benefits and the responsibilities of citizenship in 21st-century American society. So, what resources does our faith offer us to participate in civic life? What lessons from centuries of Catholic tradition and the experience of Catholic history in the United States can we share with our fellow citizens? What can we do together to promote the common good and care for our common home?

 

From the beginning Christians have been conscious of being both in the world while not of it. [John 17:15-16]. Jesus, as we just heard, cleverly commanded his questioners to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s [Matthew 22:20]. Saint Paul said that our citizenship is in heaven, but he also instructed Christians to obey lawful governments and to pay their taxes [Philippians 3:20; Romans 13:1-7].  In the 3rd century, despite Roman persecution, the early Christians prayed, “for Emperors, their ministers, for the condition of the world, for peace everywhere, and for the delaying of the end” [Apologetics, 39].

 

The New Testament emphasized that our religious obligations to God, while always absolute in themselves, do not cancel out our membership in civil society and our resulting obligations to the political community in which we all share. Whether as public officials or as ordinary citizens, we want the peace, security, and justice that civil society makes possible. And we have corresponding obligations. Thus, the Second Vatican Council called upon all citizens to “be mindful of the right and also the duty to use their free vote to further the common good” [Gaudium et Spes, 75].

 

Civilization doesn’t come free. Nor does our faith allow us any excuse to act as if it did. Thus, the Second Vatican Council warned: “They are mistaken who, knowing that we have here no abiding city but seek one which is to come, think that they may therefore shirk their earthly responsibilities. … This split between the faith which many profess and their daily lives deserves to be counted among the more serious errors of our age” [Gaudium et Spes, 43; Cf. Hebrews 13:14; 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13; Ephesians 4:28].

 

The same Council taught that, while the Church as such has received from Christ “no proper mission in the political, economic or social order,” even so from its explicitly religious mission comes “a light and an energy which can serve to structure and consolidate the human community according to the divine law” [Gaudium et Spes, 42].

 

Over time, the Church has adopted - and adapted to ever changing political and social situations - the ancient understanding that human beings are social and political by nature [Cf. Aristotle, Politics I, 2], that human beings are naturally intended to live and thrive in close cooperation with others, and that the most developed and fulfilling form of that is our political association as fellow citizens. This political association as citizens with one another provides us with many benefits, which we would not otherwise enjoy. At the same time, it also challenges us with serious responsibilities and obligations to one another and to the wider community.

In this traditional understanding, political choices are ultimately moral choices that express what we value. Such choices identify whom we care about enough to include (or not) and highlight what kind of nation (and world) we want to be. 

 

As Catholics and citizens, we need to be particularly attentive to this dimension of political decision-making, to the moral complexities of power, of pursuing power, of exercising power. As I said at the outset, Jesus did not conveniently clarify what precisely belongs to God and what to Caesar. He recognized both duties. Then as now, he challenged the Pharisees - and he challenges us – to give God his due while caring for the world.

As Catholics and citizens, we need to respond to the challenges of voting and other political choices in a morally serious way that transcends simplistic sloganeering and emotional appeals to narrowly defined secular identities and group interests. As our own American bishops reminded us over a decade ago: “Catholics may choose different ways to respond to compelling social problems, but we cannot differ on our moral obligation to help build a more just and peaceful world through morally acceptable means, so that the weak and vulnerable are protected and human rights and dignity are defended” [USCCB, Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship (2015), 20]. 

Homily for the 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, October 18, 2026.

 

"Don't Let the Lie Pass"

 

"Don't let the lie pass." So said Simon Seebag Montefiore on a recent podcast discussion, about his new book The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East (NY: Knopf, 2026). The "lie" to which he referred was the increasingly prominent anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist, anti-Jewish line promoted and perpetuated by pro-Palestinian, leftist elites, especially now and especially here in the great Western imperial and colonial powers. Setting straight the historical record about the founding and the subsequent survival of Israel is one, but only one, aspect of The Cauldron, which is in fact an incredibly detailed history of the wider Middle East (19 countries in all) from 1900 until now.

A bestselling author of Catherine the Great & Potemkin, Stalin, Young Stalin, The Romanovs, and Jerusalem, Montefiore is a British-born descendent of the prominent Sephardic Sebag-Montefiore Jewish family. Here he guides the reader through the multiple twists and turns of one of the world's most complicated regions. While we in the West may be primarily preoccupied with Israel, because of a shared religious history, Montefiore convinces the reader that one must understand the wider story of the entire region from Iran to Morocco, from the Ottoman sultanate to today's multiplicity of (largely artificial) nation states. Hence, his account begins, not in Jerusalem or Constantinople or in one of the Western capitals destined soon to redraw the region's borders, but in Arabia where in 1902 the future Ibn Saud conquered Ryadh and began what we now know as the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Prior to the transformations forced upon them by the 20th century, most people lived under empires of some sort or other. In what we call the Middle East at the turn of the 20th century, that was the Ottoman Empire, which had conquered Constantinople and ended the Christian Byzantine Roman Empire five centuries earlier. To the West was Europe with its mix of empires and nation states. To the east was the ancient nation of Iran, the modern continuation of the ancient Persian Empire. Besides Iran, the only other authentic ancient national state in the region was Egypt, then part of the Ottoman Empire but in practice a British protectorate. 

Montefiore recounts in intensive detail the military and political processes by which this sprawling area, populated by a multiplicity of ancient peoples, coexisting as neighbors often peacefully, but sometimes not, was divided into a set of new national states, most of which had never existed before in any form, however ancient the names they adopted (e.g., Lebanon, Syria). One of those new states (although by no means the newest), Israel, represented an ancient people recently restored to their ancient land and restoring its ancient name.

"One of the depressing threads is the grinding reduction of this gleaming mosaic to a bleaker binary of nationalisms." This is a prolonged account of how the Middle East today has become "less and less diverse and tolerant." Nasser expelled Egypt's Jews, Westerners, Turco-Circassians, Greeks, and Armenians, and in the process "impoverished Egypt and ended two millennia of cosmopolitanism." In the one undoubted genuine genocide to take place in the region during this period, the Ottomans "erased" the Armenians. To create modern Turkey, "hundreds of thousands of Greeks" were expelled from lands where Greeks had lived almost since the Trojan War. "But one of the greatest tragedies has been the decades-long purge of Christians: thanks to Arab nationalism and islamist terror, Middle Eastern Christians have declined from 20 percent in 1900 to 4 per cent today. In 1900, Christinas were 14 per cent of Iraq's population; now they are 0.4 percent; in 1990 a million Christians, today 150,000."

The author also considers "the messy interventions of outsiders." The first part of the book examines "the end of the Ottoman Empire and the thirty-year rule by French, British, Italians, and briefly Greeks, which was followed by the U.S. and Soviet interventions of the Cold War." The rest chronicles the multiplicity of new states and their eighty or so years of independence with internal and mutual conflicts.

The entire account is somewhat daunting. The transformation (mostly for the worse) of ancient societies like Egypt and Iran is described in detail. Likewise described are the self-creation of Saudi Arabia and the artificial creations of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Jordan by France and Britain. And, of corse, the complicated story of Israel's founding and the many missed opportunities for the creation of an Arab Palestinian state alongside it. The familiar adage about how the Palestinians have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity is abundantly confirmed.

The account also includes often overlooked areas and contemporary conflicts in the region - for example, the Third Sudanese Civil War, which "is by far the greatest civilian massacre in the Middle East in modern times." In that league, of course, is Iran, which massacred its civilian population in two infamous days in January of this year, "an event so colossal that it may be the largest single event massacre in the entire Middle East since 1900."

Concluding with the recent conflict in and with Iran is not accidental. Montefiore considers the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran "a world-changing epochal moment as significant as 1789 and 1917." He suggests "it was not so much Islam that was radicalized after 1979, but revolutionism that was Islamised." Meanwhile, some "Arab monarchies have become citadels of the open version of Islam. But this is a recent, fragile achievement, dependent on particularly inspired leaders in the Kingdom and Emirates - and a period of safety under American protection between 1991 and 2026 that could already be over."

Israel, meanwhile, he believes, has become "both swaggering and insecure, over-reaching and under-prepared, secular liberal and militaristic messianic, spectacular in tactics, impoverished in strategy." To thrive, he believes "it needs to convert military success into creative coexistence and regional alliance."

The Cauldron contains more historical information than many readers may be looking for and more than most may be prepared to assimilate. Beneath all the details, however, is a coherent analysis of one of the world's most consistently contentious regions, which may be indispensable for understanding whatever ways forward may yet be findable.