Monday, March 18, 2024

Christendom (The Book)

 

Peter Heather is the chair of medieval history at King’s College, London, and has written an historian's history, Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion AD 300-1300 (NY: Knopf, 2023). In over 700 pages, Heather deals with a thousand years of European history, the first millennium of Christian Europe ("Christendom"). The premise underlying what he sees as his new approach to the subject is the change caused by our own contemporary experience e of the decline of Christianity in the modern world. In the past, it was possible to assume that Christianity's victory over its Roman and post-Roman rivals reflected Christianity's religious superiority. Christendom is the author's response to "the pressing intellectual challenge of reassessing Christianity's rise to pre-eminent hint he light of its modern eclipse, by re-examining the historical processes that first generated the defining coincidence between Europe and the cultural dominance of the Christian religion."

This leads him, for example, to reinterpret Roman religious history after Constantine's conversion less as the Christianization of the empire but rather more as the "Romanization of Christianity." This leads him to emphasize the element of contingency on the historical process. At any number of points, things could conceivably have gone differently had not this or that non-inevitably development occurred.

Part One deals with the late imperial period, when, in the aftermath of Constantine's conversion, the Christian religion recruited classical philosophy and institutionalized itself as part of the Roman state system, with all the advantages that gave it. Part Two examines the end of the empire in the West and the crisis that created for Christianity (specifically Nicene Christianity), resolved by a combination religious "self-reinvention" as a religion suitable for a warrior society and success in terms of the eventual embrace of Nicene Christianity by the successor states, which inherited the Roman emperor's religious role. Finally Part Three considers the coherent leadership of the restored empire of Charlemagne and the subsequent spread of Christianity to virtually all of Europe and its successful transformation into the popular mass religion and highly institutionalized structure we are familiar with from the High middle Ages. In the process, the reader learns an enormous amount of incredible detail about the political and cultural history of Christian Europe's formative thousand years.

Heather fully recognizes that some (maybe many) Christinas embraced their faith for authentically religious reasons and practiced and promoted authentic Christian piety. However, he always gives greater weight to the multitude of other complex considerations and motivations and contingent events which made the growth and expansion and triumph of Christendom possible, particularly among political and social elites. That faith itself was a key component in Christianity's constant "self-reinvention" is not denied, but tends to seem secondary to other more humanly explicable explanations for Christianity's success. Of course, a faith perspective will accept much of Heather's more secular data but also consider those developments as providential.

It is valuable to know the contingencies that - whether by historical happenstance or by the plan of providence - produced Christian Europe. For, as the author rightly recognizes, we are once again in a world where there are other alternatives, and Christianity can only benefit from fuller reflection on his the faith has managed at other times when here were other alternatives.

The author himself acknowledges that the present situation is not entirely new. Christendom also experienced a radical reduction in the aftermath of the rise of Islam, which not only conquered considerable Christian territory but provided an analogous situation (but this tine in reverse) to the mass conversion experience in the late Roman Empire. So the contemporary situation is not as new as it might seem. Then the old heartland of Christianity fell to Islam and was replaced by a new European centered Christianity. Now that European heartland seems to be giving way to a secular, post-Christian alternative, and seems likewise to be in the process of being replaced by a new "self-reinvention" of Christianity, based in the Global South.

Likewise, his emphasis on the weakness of the papacy in the first two periods he describes was in an analogous manner repeated in modern European history, in the period prior to and immediately after the French Revolution, only to be followed by the present period in which the papacy appears religiously more centralized and powerful than at any previous period, including even the High Middle Ages - but this time without the coercive powers he ascribes to the late medieval Church.


Sunday, March 17, 2024

Seeing Jesus

 

 Thirty-something years ago, when I was serving as deacon down the road at Saint Malachy’s, the so-called “Actors’ Chapel” (so-called because of its historic ministry to the theater-district), I vividly remember how, after the Saturday afternoon matinee, a crowd would gather outside the theater across the street to get a glimpse of some actor or actress in the cast. More or less, that is how I imagine the scene in today’s Gospel, when some Greeks came to Philip and asked him, “Sir, we would like to see Jesus.” They approached Philip, because being from Bethsaida in Galilee, he presumably could converse comfortably with them in Greek. Mindful of his place in the group’s hierarchy, however, Philip went and told Andrew, Peter’s brother. Then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus.


Now, you might think that after all this we might hear more about those Greeks and their meeting with Jesus.  John never mentions them again, however. We never even hear whether or not they actually got to meet Jesus. We may presume that, along with Andrew and Philip and probably the rest of the crowd, they at least got to hear him – to hear him speak about how the hour had come for the Son of Man to be glorified, and hear him pray “Father, glorify your name,” the prayer of a faithful Son, full of confidence in his Father’s response. In fact, assuming they hung around long enough, they would also have heard the Father’s answer, when a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it and will glorify it again.”

 

Of course, the crowd there disagreed – as many people then did and many people still do (and do a lot) - about Jesus. And, so, some said, “An Angel has spoken to him,” but others just thought it was thunder.  Just thunder.

 

Who and what Jesus is – the Son of the living God, or a long-dead historical curiosity, a passing fad that came and went with all the permanence of the last thunderstorm – is also at the heart of who and what WE are, here and now.  

 

Conditioned as we all are by our contemporary visual media and by photo and film records of recent historical figures and events, it would be only natural that we too would like to have seen Jesus. Obviously, such access to the past is not possible. The only Jesus we can have any actual access to in the present is the Risen Christ, the living Son of God, sitting at the Father’s right hand, who intercedes forever on our behalf. Like the Greeks, who, for their access to Jesus, went to Philip and Andrew (in other words, to those appointed as Apostles), our access to Jesus, our encounter with Christ, is through the Church, which continues his life and mission in the world.

 

We, who are here today, we encounter Christ through our experience of being his Church – not just what happens here on Sunday, but in a very special way what happens here on Sunday, which in turn further forms us as Church for the rest of the week and indeed the rest of life. At every Mass every day before the Sign of Peace, we pray Look not on our sins, but on the faith of your Church. The Church is that whole host of the faithful both living and dead who sustain us in faith, in hope, and in love, a Communion of Saints that unites us here and now with the faithful all over the world and back through time with those who have shown Christ to the world in the past. That is why the saints are so important for us. – like, for example, our city’s patron, Saint Patrick, who died on this date over 1500 years ago after having extended the Church’s reach even beyond the borders of the Roman Empire.

 

What this also means is that (again like the Greeks in the Gospel) the rest of the world – the pagan world then, the secular world now - also encounters Christ primarily through its experience of his Church, which is to say, its experience of us. Indeed, as has often been said, the Church is essentially the only experience of Christ most people will ever have in life – the face of Christ that they see, the word of God that they hear. So (and this is the problematic part) if in any way our behavior conceals rather than reveals the face of Christ, then the word of God may seem silent - precisely when and where it may most need to be proclaimed - and the love of God may appear absent from the very world Christ became part of, precisely in order to save it.

 

We hear many stories about sons in the Bible – from Cain and Abel on – bad sons, good sons, jealous sons, prodigal sons, and faithful obedient sons. In Jesus, we see the ultimately good and faithful Son, God’s Son, whose perfect obedience is the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.

 

In that, he is everything there is to be. Revealed in and through his Church, he is everything anyone ever needs to hear or see.

 

All the more reason then, to make sure he is heard and seen in and through us!

 

Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, March 17, 2024.


Photo: Lent 2024 at Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Missionary to the Whole World


As if one Saint Patrick's Day per year were not enough, the calendrical quirk, according to which this year the anniversary of the saint's death falls on a Sunday, gives us two additional Saint Patrick's Days - the religious one on Monday, March 18, and the civic one, highlighted by the famous 5th-Avenue parade today. 

Other than the fact that he never saw, let alone ate, a potato, we don't know as much as we might wish about Saint Patrick. We do know that he was the son of a deacon and the grandson of a priest, who was born into a well-to-do family of landed gentry in the Roman province of Britain. At 16, his comfortable life suddenly ceased when he was captured and enslaved by Irish raiders. During 6 years as a slave herdsman in what is now County Mayo, Ireland, Patrick’s conventional Christianity was transformed into an ardent, fervent faith. After a successful escape and return to Britain, he felt a call to convert the pagan Irish to Christianity.  Ordained a bishop, he returned to Ireland and remained there until his death on March 17, 461.

 

Unlike Patrick’s home island of Britain, Ireland had never been part of the Roman Empire. It was beyond the borders of what then constituted civilization. Saint Patrick stands out as one of the first in Western Christian history to feel the imperative to evangelize beyond the borders of the Empire, to take literally the the Gospel’s mandate to teach all nations.  In his Confession, Patrick described his sense of mission. “I want to spend myself in that country, even in death, if the Lord should grant me this favor. I am deeply in his debt, for he gave me the great grace that through me many peoples should be reborn in God, and then made perfect by confirmation and everywhere among them clergy ordained for a people so recently coming to believe, one people gathered by the Lord from the ends of the earth. ... It is among that people that I want to wait for the promise made by him, who assuredly never tells a lie. ... This is our faith: believers are to come from the whole world.”

 

An altar in honor of the great missionary Saint Patrick is found at the east end of the north aisle of the mother church of the Paulist Fathers in New York, the city of which Saint Patrick is also patron. It was designed by the same John LaFarge who also directed the original design of the church's nave, painted the circular mural The Angel of the Moon on the south wall of the sanctuary, and did the two blue end windows above the sanctuary and the five lancet windows above the main door. The altarpiece (photo) was painted by William Laurel Harris, who also painted the large mural The Crucifixion over the main door. It portrays St. Patrick, flanked by Saints Columba and Bridget, driving out paganism, while, above, St. Patrick preaches to an Irish chieftan. 


In this particularly challenging period in the Church's life, when so much ecclesial energy is focused internally and Catholic elites are increasingly polarized about issues of internal church organization and polity, it is good to be reminded of the Church's missionary mandate. It may also serve as a bittersweet reminder that the mandate is never fully fulfilled, that many places once seemingly converted to Christ and his Church have since followed other paths and require re-evangelization, which may prove to be the contemporary Church's most pressing - and neglected - task.


Thursday, March 14, 2024

Cabrini (The Movie)

 


She is the patron saint of immigrants, Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, who lived from 1850 to 1917. Born in Italy, she founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart in 1880, of which she remained Superior General until her death. When she asked Pope Leo XIII's approval to establish a mission in China, the Pope advised her to go "not to the east, but to the west" - to the United States to serve the immense needs of the hordes of poor Italian immigrants who were then flooding the cities of the United States. So, she and six other sisters came to New York, where, like so many other Italian immigrants, she was less than enthusiastically received by those in charge, including New York's Irish Catholic establishment – in her case, New York’s Archbishop Michael Corrigan. But she persisted in her mission, and over time she founded some 67 institutions in major cities both in the United States and in South America. In their day, those institutions served Italian and other immigrants and made a notable impact in their communities. Mother Cabrini died in Chicago on December 22, 1917, and is buried where her American mission began, here in New York, in a shrine on Fort Washington Avenue near Fort Tryon Park in northern Manhattan. Having become a naturalized American citizen in 1909 (thus, in effect, experiencing herself the fullness of the American immigrant experience), she became the first American citizen to be canonized in 1946. Mother Cabrini had special significance for my grandmother, who, as long as she lived, made sure that we went to visit her shrine yearly to honor the great Italian patron of immigrants to the New World.  

And now she is the subject of a full-length film, Cabrini, released earlier this month, which highlights her missionary and charitable efforts and the resistance she encountered, especially the anti-Italian bigotry and racism. The film focuses on the desperate plight of Italian immigrants in New York and on Mother Cabrini's immense energy (despite her physical frailty) and her enormous ability as in effect a shrewd entrepreneur, founding what the film calls "an empire of hope." In conventional treatments of her story, both her physical frailties and her business acumen are acknowledged but always seem secondary to her accomplishments. In this film, they remain front and center, giving her accomplishments a fuller, more rounded dimension.

In Shakespeare in Love, Queen Elizabeth I refers to herself as "a woman in a man's profession." Cabrini seems to want to highlight how Saint Francis Cabrini was a woman very much disrupting a men's world. In fact, much of the same could be said of many modern religious foundresses. Indeed, for much of its history, the Catholic church. has provided women with a unique outlet for this-worldly talent through the institutions of women's religious communities, especially teaching and health-care communities, of which many were founded here in the U.S. and Canada.

Overwhelmingly, the film focuses our attention not just on the plight of the late 19th-century Italian immigrants but. on the ethnic-racial-religious hostility to them on the part of the civic establishment and the larger society. Perhaps particularly relevant is how it portrays the struggle on the part of New York's Irish Archbishop to come to terms with the reality of a new ethnic component to his hitherto largely Irish flock. It offers insight into the dilemma that has faced each successive wave of immigration to this country, as unwelcome outsiders eventually get a toehold and gradually advance in society and then challenged their predecessors not to close the door behind them but to recognize their common humanity with the new immigrants. This, of course, is so very much an issue today as a nation composed almost entirely of descendants of desperate immigrants is confronted with the morally and politically challenging task of accepting and integrating new immigrants to our country.

The story of Mother Cabrini is always edifying and always relevant. It may be never more so, however, than at this particular juncture in American history, when who we are as a people, as "a nation of immigrants," is once again one of the central issues confronting the soul of America.


Monday, March 11, 2024

Oscar Night



The 96th Academy Awards - Hollywood's annual celebration of itself - took place last night. Because of travel, I missed the first part of the show. Usually, when I have watched the Oscar show, it has been more for social reasons than an overwhelming interest in the proceedings themselves. Las nights show, however, seemed - at least to my unsophisticated tastes - an improvement on past performances. Best of all, it seemed shorter, ending at a decent hour.

It was no surprise that Oppenheimer more or less stole the show. Personally, I would have given The Holdovers' Paul Giamatti the Oscar for Best Actor, but it is always hard to stop a runaway train. Robert Downey, Jr., may well have deserved his award, but Oppenheimer would have been a better move without most of the last hour, in which case Downey's award would inevitably have had to go to someone else. 

As seems typical of very long movies, Oppenheimer is likely longer than it needs to be. Apart, obviously, from the dramatic, convincingly scary, central scene of the Trinity atomic test, it is largely a three-hour talk-fest. Its artistry seems to me to be overdone and thus gets in the way of the story. Accordingly, I have been criticized for disrespecting the director's artistry, but artistic self-expression leaves me unmoved, whatever the medium. That said, its length is worth sitting through, and its artistry of entangled timelines, constant scene-shifting amid a confusingly large cohort of famous scientists (whose names most of us no longer remember or never knew), and its gratuitous back-and-forth from color to black-and-white are all still worth the extra work they impose on the audience.

Oppenheimer aside, it was nice that the original Mothers Day got so much attention at the Oscars. Maybe the most moving moment was when Mstyslav Chernov accepted the documentary award for 20 Days in Mariupol, which he called Ukraine’s first Oscar. Given what is happening (or perhaps one should say not happening) in Washington right now, the reminder of the Ukraine war's civilizational significance was timely. And, in keeping with the evening's primary purpose of focusing on movies, I resonated with what may prove to be one of the evening's more memorable comments, “Cinema forms memories and memories form histories.”

Otherwise, the Oscars show seemed somewhat less political than usual - apart from Jimmy Kimmel's great "Isn't it past your jail time?" response to Donald Trump, who unsurprisingly could not resist the opportunity for a real-time post on Truth Social by Trump. “Has there ever been a worse host than Jimmy Kimmel at the Oscars.” In that exchange (and with that audience) Kimmel clearly won.

But for me the most fun part of the evening had to be Ryan Gosling's rousingly wild, show stopping, rendition of I’m Just Ken. All in all, quite contrary to my recent experience and despite the obvious lack of suspense about most of the winners, the Oscar show was actually fun to watch this year!