The Social Reckoning

 

According to Aaron Sorkin, who wrote and directed it, The Social Reckoning is not, as such, a sequel to his 2010 The Social Network, which chronicled the problematic birth of Facebook. Strictly speaking, perhaps, it is not.  Yet Sorkin also has said it “never occurred” to him that Jesse Eisenberg wouldn’t want to reprise the role of Mark Zuckerberg, a role that earned him an Oscar nomination in 2010. For his part, Eisenberg apparently no longer wants “to be associated with that character.” Instead, the billionaire founder and CEO of Facebook is played by Jeremy Strong, who played Kendall Roy in HBO's Succession and Roy Cohn in the 2024 film The Apprentice. So we are already used to Strong playing unlikable, unsympathetic people very well.

The Social Network focused on the founding of Facebook and on the damage done to Zuckerberg personally and to his friendship with Eduardo Saverin. Sequel or not, The Social Reckoning, released this week, focuses more broadly on the damage done to our wider world by social media, damage to us as individuals and to American society more broadly. The Social Reckoning dramatizes the 2021 Facebook leak by whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), a Facebook data scientist, who leaked photos of the company's internal documents to Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), a political reporter newly covering the intersection of politics with technology for The Wall Street Journal, who used the inside information to write "the Facebook Files." The leak suggested that Facebook knew its platforms spread misinformation, encourage radicalization, and possibly harm teens' mental health, but did little to fix it, thus exposing the megacompany's allegedly willful damage to society.

Horwitz is portrayed as technologically ignorant, even about how to use GPS. Haugen has to explain everything to him. She starts out as a true believer in Facebook's "mission," but is disillusioned by some of her actual experiences at the company and, above all, by the radicalization of a former friend. The interactions between Horwitz and Haugen are very human and provide the closest thing to comic relief in the film, much of which is super serious and somewhat depressing. The film jumps around chronologically. There is the Horwiz and Haugen story, but also a Zuckerberg story (which includes images of January 6), and both take place at different times. But the fashionable technique of going back and forth in time is made less challenging and difficult for the viewer by a timeline which conveniently appears on the screen the first few occasions, thus clarifying what is happening and when.

The film highlights the perennial problem of how hard it can be to do anything about extreme concentrations of economic, technological, cultural, and political  power in unaccountable corporations and unaccountable individuals - especially in a country increasingly oligarchical and post-political.

Apart from sharing these postings, at this point I use Facebook primarily to wish friends a Happy Birthday. It frightens me to learn that some 43% of the American public relies on Facebook to get their news!

"Bully, Coward, Victim"

 

Jeremy Strong, who played Roy Cohn in the 2024 movie The Apprentice, has called Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark's monumental biography American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn's Dark Journey From Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump (Scribner, Simon and Schuster) "essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand Donald Trump's America." Indeed, as his biographer summarizes him, Roy Cohn (1927-1986) "used his entire career to subvert the establishment, breaking all the rules and creating a divisive, highly partisan political culture ... a man whose personal immorality planted the seeds of America's descent into the political folly of the twenty-first century."

That's probably pinning a lot on just one historical figure. It defies plausibility to place all the blame for our past and present political disasters on one person, however reprehensible, On the other hand, there probably is no other single individual who more closely personifies the process by which we got to where we are as a nation. It was from Cohn that Trump famously learned the all-important lesson he has practiced so effectively as politician and as president, "that the facts in any case could be drowned out by strident counterclaims" and "that the pyrotechnics of publicity were more important than the law."

But, before Trump, Bird's book takes us back to another, earlier era - post-war New York, the insider-outsider world of mid-20th-century New York's Jewish elites experiencing both great accomplishment and great resentment. That was also the era of Cold War worries about communism (both the real thing in the form of the Soviet Union and the imagined internal threats exploited by McCarty, Cohn, et al.), of the resentful remnants of pre-war populism and isolationism that empowered McCarthyism and have now been revived with great vengeance, of a half-hidden, but constantly gossiped-about closeted gay subculture, of seemingly omnipresent organized crime, and finally of a widespread network of elite and celebrity gossip. There is a lot of such gossip reported in this book, and a reader really can't quite be sure how much of it should ultimately be credited as true. (On page 252, for example, Cohn is reported discussing judicial appointments with Cardinal Spellman - in the year after the Cardinal's death.) It was an era of innuendo, both sexual and political, that negatively counterbalanced what was actually positive about that period, particularly the unprecedented and widespread prosperity that makes many still remember that post-war era more fondly than it probably deserves!

Roy Cohn never acknowledged the true nature of his final illness and died of AIDS in 1986. He has a square in the AIDS Quit which says "Bully, Coward, Victim," - a fair enough epitaph, which this biography effectively explains and illustrates!

By the standards of his time - or almost any time - Cohn was born and raised in comfortable, even privileged circumstances, the son of a Judge and his wealthy wife, who was also an extremely domineering and doting mother, who apparently seriously spoiled her only son. He attended Horace Mann School and so "traveled in the company of all sorts of well-connected adolescent boys" - predominantly "the sons of Jewish lawyers, doctors, and bankers." As if predestined, he became a lawyer. 

The author highlights one particular aspect of Cohn's family history which, he suggests, would be reflected in his life-long patterns of resentment. As a boy, he regularly accompanied his mother to visit her brother, Roy's "Uncle Bernie," in prison. Bernard Marcus was criminally convicted in connection with the failure of his family's Bank. The bank's failure might possibly have been averted if other bankers had been willing to participate in a rescue plan. Roy's mother taught him that Bernie and his Jewish bank were scapegoats, victims of establishment anti-Semitism. Bird quotes one banker saying that few wanted to bail out a bank that "catered to immigrants" and was run by "those Jews." Cohn also came to believe that Jewish communists had agitated against and helped precipitate the run on the bank. Thus, he grew up resenting both the anti-semitic establishment and communists.

Cohn completely embraced the "politics of resentment and distrust of the intellectual class and the establishment" associated then with Senator Joseph McCarthy and associated now with right-wing populism. (Where left-wing populism's culture of resentment fits in is also a discussion worth having, but it is beyond the scope of this biography.) Cohn famously played an eager part in the controversial prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, "which spoke to Jewish insecurities that manifested along class lines. [Judge Irving] Kaufman and Cohn were Park Avenue Jews pitted against Lower East Side Jews like the Rosenbergs." Then he went to work for McCarthy - "in a sense burning my bridges behind me," closing the door on "a comfortable, New York Jewish Democratic life." He called himself McCarthy's "brains." The biography calls him "McCarthy's Rasputin." (The New Republic's Michael Straight had labeled Cohn the "Boy Rasputin" of the Army-McCarthy hearings.)

Bird's biography devotes considerable attention to Cohn's association with McCarthy and to his intense infatuation with David Schine, a bizarre friendship which in the end paradoxically helped to bring down McCarthy. Bird's account of the important national trauma of McCarthyism (and Cohn's part in it) is well worth reading for its own sake. The author's criticism of Eisenhower's slow and apparently passive response to McCarthy strikes me as somewhat excessive, given the complexity of the situation the president found himself in. (Consider, for example, the contrasting interpretation of Eisenhower by Princeton political scientist Fred Greenstein.)  But it is a plausible interpretation. Bird is certainly correct in interpreting the battle between McCarthy and Eisenhower as "part of a larger culture war, a perennial conflict in American society between urban liberal pluralists and resentful agrarian populists." After the televised Army-McCarthy hearings, the senator was censured in late 1954. Instead of confronting McCarthy's anti-communist crusade directly, however, "the Republican and Democratic establishments destroyed McCarthy via sexual innuendo." McCarthy himself died not much later, in 1957. But Bird casts Cohn as the great continuation of McCarthyism, which "would poison the American political landscape for decades to come, dividing liberals and sowing distrust inside the left. Cold War liberals ostracized civil libertarian liberals, creating further bitterness. And McCarthy's nativist, isolationist, and racist supporters never went away."

After McCarthy, the biography continues with a long, somewhat sordid story of Cohn's multiple legal shenanigans (which earned him multiple indictments and eventual disbarment just before his death), his organized crime mob connections, and perhaps most pervasively his sexual adventures. Cohn was "a high-functioning sex addict." This is a book about politics, but it is also very much a tawdry tale about sex. It highlights what one might call Cohn's ideological interpretation of sexuality, equating homosexuality with weakness and heterosexuality with strength, aggressiveness, and toughness. Hence his easy ability to combine his homosexual lifestyle with his public "heterosexual" presentation. Cohn himself "used the homosexuality of others to smear and destroy them." Whatever else this sad story is, it certainly serves as an indictment of the human cost of the closet culture, a very vivid portrayal of how much harm has been occasioned by society's forcing so many to live twisted, inauthentic lives.

At the same time, this account also highlights how society's social and sexual mores changed radically during his lifetime. Commenting on the many politicians and celebrities who attended Cohn's 52nd birthday party at Studio 54 in 1979, the author observes: "Attending Roy's birthday party at such a den of libertine excess signaled that Manhattan's power brokers understood that celebrity now eclipsed indecency."

Cohn's connection with future President Donald Trump, which began in 1973, inevitably gets a lot of attention in this biography. Subsequent history has retrospectively imparted increasingly greater import to their relationship than it might otherwise have warranted. Indeed, the author acknowledges that he "realized that with the political rise of Donald Trump," he "had somehow underestimated. the significance of Roy Cohn." Cohn's cousin David Marcus thought that Cohn "really felt this pride of ownership in Trump. He'd created Trump. He had saved Trump from ruin after they met. And he felt this odd attraction to him until the end." Cohn "deeply resented New York's intellectuals, its intellectuals, and particularly its elite law firms." Trump shares that resentment. "I'll never have the goodwill of the establishment, the tastemakers of New York," Trump said in 1990.

Bird believes that "Cohn's influence and disrepute has only been magnified by the poisonous atmosphere he left behind. He cultivated a political culture marked by bitter, divisive discourse." However, he also admits that "these passions are deeply rooted in American history." In taking over the Republican party, Trump may have demolished what was left of the old Republican establishment. But Bird himself recognizes that the resented establishment "was disintegrating in the 1970s." Its collapse "eventually opened the door to divisive populist rages."  

It does not, therefore, I think, diminish the significance of Cohn in his own context and at his own particular time to ask whether the long-term outcome would have been all that much different without Cohn. Clearly, Cohn was an asset to McCarthy and later to Trump. "As the years went by the relationship [with Trump] became less of  the mentor molding the young man and more of the fixer having to dip into his favor bank to assuage Trump's needs." Maybe McCarthy might have done somewhat less damage without Cohn (at least in this or that particular case that Cohn was particularly involved in). Certainly, without Cohn, Trump's rise in New York might have been bumpier. But would history have been all that different, given that (as the author also acknowledges) McCarthy and Trump both reflected and exploited resentments and passions long present in American society? Those resentments and passions propelled Trump to the presidency. Without Trump's personal charisma, those resentments and passions would obviously have had to find some other vehicle, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they would likely have done so, sooner or later, in some form or other.

Finally, this book inadvertently raises an even darker question - quite contrary,  I suspect, to the author's intention. Let us assume that much of the celebrity and political gossip that permeates parts of this biography may in fact be largely true. If so - if the depressing picture the author paints of politics and society, especially of what goes on in elite spaces, is even largely accurate - then doesn't that raise a deeper and more troubling question of what to make of this endemic corruption, which in this account seemingly spares no institution, whether political, judicial, civic, social, or religious? Really, no American institution effectively escapes the taint of corruption in this account. What does that mean for the viability of democratic and representative government and the social and civic institutions on which representative democracy depends? We naturally want to identify villains whom we can blame for all our woes. But Cohn clearly did not create the widespread culture of corruption from which he profited (even if one wants to credit him with worsening it). If, however, American politics and civic institutions, if elite culture and American social life are indeed so endemically corrupt, then perhaps the populist critique that once empowered McCarthy and more recently has empowered Trump, then maybe much of that populist critique may be an understandable response to actual reality and all that resentment may be somewhat justified. Does what this account purports to expose undermine the liberal alternative it aspires to uphold? What would it mean if the past and present populist indictment of our governing elites and their institutions might be truer than the author (or we) would want to admit.

And where would that leave us and our country's future?

America's Cathedral

 

In our local liturgical calendar, today is celebrated as the feast of the Anniversary of the Dedication of New York's Saint Patrick's Cathedral, perhaps the most famous and most visited Catholic cathedral in the United States. New Yorkers, famously given to unseemly grandiosity about our city, sometimes speak of Saint Patrick’s as "America’s Cathedral" or sometimes even “America’s Parish Church.” However overdone such language sometimes sounds, it is certainly true that Saint Patrick’s is one of the most recognized cathedrals in the country, regularly visited by resident New Yorkers, and a major tourist site to which flock visitors - Catholics and non-Catholics both - from all over the world.

When the Diocese of New York was created in 1808, it still had only one Catholic church, Saint Peter's on Barclay Street, dedicated in 1786. Thanks to the Napoleonic Wars, New York's first bishop never made it across the Atlantic. So, it was Boston's Bishop John Cheverus who dedicated the first Saint Patrick's Cathedral on Mulberry Street in 1815. It was New York's fourth bishop (and first archbishop), John Hughes, the same Bishop who approved the founding of the Paulist Fathers and established this parish in 1858, who also began the construction of our present cathedral on 5th Avenue. His intention was "to erect a cathedral in the city of New York that may be worthy of our increasing numbers, intelligence and wealth as a religious community" and "a public architectural monument of the present and prospective greatness of this metropolis of the American continent." Saint Patrick's was formally opened by Hughes' successor, John Cardinal McCloskey, in 1879, and was finally consecrated by Archbishop John Cardinal Farley on October 5, 1910.

According to archdiocesan historian Thomas Shelley, in those early years "two parishes set the standard for the rest of the diocese, the new cathedral and the Paulist Church of St. Paul the Apostle." 

I know I have said this before, but it probably bears repeating. When we celebrate the dedication of a church, we obviously celebrate a place, a very special and sacred place set apart unlike any other. We also celebrate a people, the people the place represents. And we celebrate a relationship, the community connection that binds the people together.

All churches are special places, of course. Obviously, God cannot be confined to any one place. Still, as human beings, we can only operate in space and time, which is why God himself became human – in a particular place and at a particular time in human history. So, it’s no surprise that, through the ages, God has continued to inspire his people to set aside special places in which to assemble to worship him. So too Archbishop Hughes and his successors planned and built and consecrated New York's great Cathedral, a gloriously neo-gothic imitation of the Cathedral of Cologne, Germany, located (like its model) at the heart of a great city center. The Cologne Cathedral is big and grand and illustrates the legacy of the Old World of Christendom. Its American imitator is likewise big and grand and signifies the aspirations of the New World.

 

But, when we commemorate the dedication of a church, we also celebrate the people the place represents. As New York's principal church, Saint Patrick's is, in a sense, the church of everyone in this city. and, since this is a city of and for the entire world, it is a church for everyone from far and near. It is no accident that one and the same name, “Church,” is used for both the people who continue Christ’s presence in the world and the place where they assemble to experience his presence most directly, by proclaiming his word and celebrating his sacrament.

 

And, when we commemorate the dedication of a church, and especially when we celebrate that of a cathedral church, we also celebrate the relationship, the community connection, that binds its people together. As the site of the cathedra, the chair from which the bishop exercises his teaching office and pastoral power within the local church, a cathedral is a sign of the unity of believers in the one faith, which the bishop proclaims and represents, which is why having a proper cathedral is so important in the life of a local church.

 

We need all three. We need places where we can be Church. We need to be a people who aspire to be Church and to build the Church in our city and our world. And we need the relationships with one another, the institutional and community connections, that can make this possible.

 

Homily for the Anniversary of the Dedication of the Metropolitan Cathedral, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, October 5, 2026.

Eight Centuries Since Francis

 

Today marks the 800th anniversary of the death (transitus) of Saint Francis of Assisi, who is perhaps the most popular saint in the Christian calendar and whose popularity extends well beyond the bounds of Christianity (although perhaps not always for the best of reasons). In observance of this anniversary, Pope Leo XIV, has decreed a Jubilee Year of Saint Francis that began on January 10, 2026, and will conclude on January 10, 2027. This Jubilee Year of Saint Francis invites us to follow the example of Saint Francis of Assisi to become models of holiness of life and constant witnesses for peace.  (During this Jubilee year, inspired by the “Pardon of Assisi” granted by Pope Honorius III to Saint Francis, a plenary indulgence is granted by the Pope to all faithful who make a pilgrimage to any Franciscan conventual church or place of worship dedicated to Saint Francis in any part of the world, under the usual conditions of sacramental confession, Eucharistic communion, and prayer for the Holy Father’s intentions).

Such extraordinary Jubilees are not new to Pope Leo. In 2003, when he was the Prior General of the worldwide Augustinian Order, Fr. Robert F. Prevost, OSA, (now Pope Leo XIV) proclaimed an Augustinian Jubilee to commemorate the 1650th anniversary (in 2004) of Saint Augustine's birth, the 700th anniversary (in 2005) of the death of Saint Nicholas of Tolentine (the first Augustinian friar to be canonized), and the 750th anniversary (in 2006) of the "Grand Union" of the Augustinians as mendicant friars. Because of the characters of Saint Francis and Saint Dominic, the 13th-century communities they founded are the two many think of first when mentioning mendicant orders. But the Augustinians also were founded as mendicants and share in that special aspect of the charism of Francis and Dominic. "While constantly promoting our spiritual connectedness to Saint Augustine and the living of the Rule, the growth of our order was also clearly rooted in the development of the 'mendicant orders,' a movement that sought to respond to the needs of the church within the context of major change in the social and cultural reality of the thirteenth century."

Elaborating on the values of the mendicant movement, the future Pope stressed the mendicants' commitment to be "radical followers of Jesus in the style of the apostles (apostolic life)," which also involved "a rejection of materialism and of the accumulation of material goods that was found not only among the merchant class but also in the clergy and within powerful monastic communities." Other shared mendicant priorities included "preaching and the teaching of theology in the recently founded universities," a "commitment to evangelize urban society from within," and "fraternal life, in imitation of the early Christian communities, reflected in the community's life of prayer, in service to others, and also in the governance of the community" [Letter to the Augustinian Family on the 750th Anniversary of the Grand Union, November 27, 2005, Freedom Under Grace: Reflections on the Spiritual Tradition That Formed Me (Image Penguin Random House), pp. 172-174].

The experience of the early mendicant movement situates Saint Francis well within the context of the medieval society he inhabited, a society so seemingly in harmony (unlike ours) 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).

Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone (1181-1226) - Saint Francis of Assisi, il poverello - 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, 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 story of Saint Francis is also, secondly, that of his followers, those who came to form the three Franciscan mendicant 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 extreme oversimplification. As his contemporaries already 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 mendicants - 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 (expressed institutionally in the different mendicant orders) and Francis' own unique gifts.

An important charism common to all mendicant orders - and, indeed, of central significance to all Institutes of Consecrated life and Societies of Apostolic Life - is community. On this Pope Leo, when he was Augustinian Prior General, had plenty to say: "Our communities must be promoters of dialogue, compassion, and understanding. Then, on the basis of a capacity to create human relationships of friendship and fraternity, it is necessary to live our vocation not only within the security of our houses and monasteries but also outside of these, where we are called to be a force that, within this world of ours and of the very Church, transmits clearly to others th message that there exists an alternative to the division and to isolation that afflict so many in the world today." [Homily at the Basiclica of Santa Maria del Popolo on the 750th Anniversary of the Grand Union of the Order, March 25, 2006, Freedom Under Grace: Reflections on the Spiritual Tradition That Formed Me (Image Penguin Random House), p. 187].

Photo: Pope Leo XIV prays at the tomb of St. Francis of Assisi at the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi. Photograph by VATICAN MEDIA /Catholic Press Photo. Credit: Independent Photo Agency / Alamy Live News.

Pope Leo in France

 

In 1804, when Napoleon Bonaparte forced Pope Pius VII to travel to Paris to confer some serious legitimacy to the military upstart's upcoming imperial coronation, the Pope was enthusiastically and respectfully received by crowd all along the way. Hard-line Republicans there still were  (especially among the military elite), but the general populace cheered and crowds sought the Pope's blessing, rejoicing in the restoration of religious freedom after the unprecedented assault perpetrated by the dark forces of Enlightenment during the recent revolution.

Last week, Pope Leo XIV followed in the path of Pius VII and traveled (more quickly and comfortably, of course) from Rome to the onetime "Eldest Daughter of the Church." And, once again, notwithstanding the strong lingering power and presence of the Enlightenment's dark legacy of laïcité, he was received with great enthusiasm. Like his predecessor, Leo also visited Notre Dame, although not to crown an upstart emperor but to celebrate the cathedral's recent restoration as a house of God and spiritual center of France. Then he celebrated an outdoor Mass at the Place de la Concorde.

No site could have been more symbolic. Originally, the Place Louis XV, the largest square. in Paris became the Place de la Revolution, where the Enlightenment revolutionaries implemented their famous reign of terror, in which King Louis XVI, Queen Marie Antoinette, and  many Catholic martyrs were murdered by the brutal, bloodthirsty secularist regime, which in time executed many of its own accomplices as well.

France remains still the source and summit of Enlightenment secularism and European civilizational suicide. Even so, stirrings of new life abound amid secularism's self-produced ruins. Of course, the crowds included the curious as well as the devout. Catholic ritual still exerts its enormous dramatic power to lift up emotions, even among mere observers. Yet, something is afoot in France - and elsewhere in secularized Europe - as the destructive consequences of the Revolution's legacy continue throughout the continent to turn hope into despair. Only the most hardboiled skeptical secularists seem still unable to understand why ordinary people might prefer hope over despair and be attracted to the one resource - already present in centuries of France's cancelled history - that can offer a way forward to hope instead of despair.

For centuries, the Enlightenment's dark imperatives have dominated our civilization, training us to look for fulfillment in a technological progress (that now threatens to destroy the planet and human life as we have known it) and an individual liberty (that has brought about isolation in place of family and friendship and community). As an alternative, Pope Leo, preaching at the Place de la Concorde, proposed "Jesus Christ, through his Incarnation, who comes to meet every person in the midst of his or her own story, and reveals himself as the true source of living water capable of quenching our thirst. This thirst that dwells in every human heart is not so much a thirst for material things, but a thirst for meaning, for truth and fulfilment. Jesus responds to our profound desire for relationship, for communion with God, in whom the fullness of life forever resides."