Looking Ahead Post-Midterms

As the vote-counting continues in Mississippi, our new American political reality is increasingly being revealed in all its clear, unambiguous, and amazing impact. Thanks to the political malpractice of America's most polarizing president, an era of stagnant polarized politics has suddenly and surprisingly given way to unprecedented possibilities for unprecedented change. Will the Democrats, flushed with energy from their staggering victory, rise to the challenge for change? Or will they fall back into their old ways, simultaneously disappointing their base and alienating mainstream voters? Time will tell. But the boundaries of what it is possible to hope for in America have been pushed farther than anyone expected just a few days ago.

For 10 years, the normal laws of political gravity, the traditional norms of political morality, have seemed to be suspended in the case of Donald Trump, whose dark, populist charisma effectively dynamited elite American politics as we had known it, at least since the New Deal and World War II. But celebrity charisma cannot easily be transferred - certainly not to Ken Paxton, Vivek Ramaswamy, or Darline Graham, and probably not to JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Ron DeSantis, or some other would-be inheritor of the discredited MAGA mantle.

American voters have shown their anger - anger at high prices, taxes in the form of tariffs, "forever wars," ICE terror, and self-dealing political corruption. More fundamentally, a country in extreme distress seems to be figuring out that oligarchy isn't just sinful. It really doesn't work, as AI's impending threat to our basic human survival is demonstrating. As serious political theorists from Aristotle to Rousseau recognized, a healthy republican polity cannot survive - let alone thrive - if its citizens are shackled by extreme economic inequality of the sort we are now experiencing.

G.K.Chesterton famously found in America "a nation with the soul of a church." That has been true at least since the Second Great Awakening at the dawn of the 19th century. Religious faith has inspired and motivated much of the best in American political history. In its own exercise of monumental political malpractice, the late 20th-century and early 21st-century Democratic party allowed itself to become increasingly identified as irreligious, even anti-religious - and have hitherto justifiably paid a political price for that malpractice. Meanwhile, American religion has increasingly been subordinated to and been distorted by a particularly negative and ugly politics, in which churches have at times been accomplices. It is one of the most hopeful outcomes of our ongoing political transformation that two of the most interesting and promising political wins for Democrats this year were a seasoned Kansas pastor and a young and charismatic Texas seminarian.

But now, looking ahead, what should the Democrats do with their majority?

No one is asking my opinion, but I'll offer it anyway. There really isn't a lot Congress can do to lower grocery and gas prices. But there is a lot Congress can do to improve the condition of ordinary Americans. Thanks to the current Congress' "Big Beautiful Bill," millions of Americans are projected to lose Medicaid coverage. If I were Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries (liberated by his huge majority from excessive dependence on his party's extreme ideological factions), I'd at minimum propose the restoration of all the recently removed Medicaid and Obamacare subsidies. Better yet, I'd propose some modest, non-threatening sounding, but comprehensible reforms - like lowering the age for Medicare, what some have called "Medicare for more." This would be a relatively popular, populist policy, with widespread public support. Quite possibly enough Republicans might support it to overcome the threat of filibuster and enable it to pass and be sent to the President. The President might well sign it, especially if he chooses to revert to his Manhattan deal-maker mode. Or he might not sign it. Or he might let it become law without his signature. If it became law, the country would benefit. If not, the Democrats would have one of their best campaign issues. In either case, the new Congress would get off to a good start, focusing on something voters actually care about.

Few elections in my lifetime have represented as momentous a potential realignment as the 2026 midterms. A real reset is possible for a nation that has been deeply divided, its politics increasingly dysfunctional, its population polarized and self-sorted. The country has clearly expressed itself against the negativity, vulgarity, and bullying tone of the past decade and opened up a unique opportunity for real change. All electoral coalitions are provisional. Trump assembled a successful new coalition in 2024, and then Republicans arrogantly proceeded to alienate most of it. The Democrats have created a different new coalition in 2026. Are they up to keeping it? Time will tell.

After the Midterms

Election Day (duly preceded by Election Week and/or Election Month) has come and gone (although in some places, as always, the counting continues). The insufferable TV ads will end now. Even here in New York, where contested races were few and far between, tasteless and often offensive campaign commercials have been endlessly repeated for weeks. (At least we have been spared Ohio's amazing experience of the worst, most morally disgusting political ad in recent memory!)

Dreadful ads notwithstanding, there is still something special about the electoral process and about the popular ritual of Election Day, as in Norman Rockwell's famous image from the 1940s. There is indeed something special about the spectacle of ordinary citizens lining up to cast their vote. It is the ultimate civic drama of democracy.

And then we wait! I am usually an early-to-bed person. I stay up on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve and - depending on the year - Election Night. This was a year to stay up!

So what has happened?

For Democrats, the waiting has paid off. As expected - and better than expected - Democrats regained control of both the House and Senate. They will have a comfortable majority in the House - comfortable enough for the new Speaker (presumably NY Congressman Hakeem Jeffries) to be able to lead without being subject to the mischief-making of the extreme far-left wing of the party, the way his Republican predecessors have been constrained by the so-called "Freedom Caucus." Speaker Johnson has had to work with a tiny, three-seat majority. Speaker-to-be Jeffries may well have a majority of as many as 240 (or more).

In the Senate, which will now be able to stop President Trump's judicial and other appointments, the Democrats won at least 54 seats, including North and South Carolina, Texas, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, and Maine. Some of these were wins we scarcely expected to see again in my lifetime!

Texas proved especially gratifying. Not only did James Talarico take the Senate seat, Democrats captured the governorship and other statewide offices. (The last Democratic Senator from Texas was LLoyd Bentson. The last Governor was Anne Richards. At 37, Talarico wasn't even born the last time Texas elected a Democratic senator!) Likewise in Georgia, Democrats swept statewide races, not only re-electing as expected John Ossoff to the Senate but also electing Keisha Lance Bottoms Governor, the first Democratic Governor in decades. Her election was an early harbinger of the night to come. Kansas, which already had a Democratic Governor, elected its first Democratic Senator on almost a century, Pastor Adam Hamilton, while Ohio returned Democrat Sherrod Brown to the Senate and chose Democrat Amy Acton over Vivek Ramaswamy.

Here in New York, Governor Hochul and the state ticket swept the state-wide offices as expected, and Democrat Cait Conley ousted Republican Mike Lawler in one of the few seriously competitive congressional races.

Democrats won as well in the particularly problematic races in Michigan and Maine. In Michigan, controversial candidate Abdul el Sayed won with 52% of the vote. In Maine, veteran Republican Susan Collins' career was finally ended by Troy Jackson, who won 53% of the vote.

While attention has largely focused on the change in congressional control, the election of so many Democratic Governors will impact the 2028 presidential race (both in terms of potential candidates but also and very importantly in terms of preventing Republican gerrymandering and ensuring election integrity) and the all-important redistricting that will follow.

So what does all this mean?

Watching the returns, I could not help remembering 1966. I was only 18, but the election was memorable. Two years after LBJ and the Democrats had won one of the biggest landslides ever, the Republicans roared back - ending the Great Society and setting the stage for the Nixon-Reagan-Bush era. In 2024, President Trump put together a successful coalition that won him both the presidency and the popular. vote as well as control of both houses of Congress. That coalition is already shattering and, for the time being at least, has virtually collapsed. Meanwhile, the Democrats have regained ground in places and among constituencies they had thought they had lost.

Why?

Trump did this! In so many respects this was a repudiation of Trump and Trumpism. In his victory speech, Georgia Senator John Ossoff said, "In sweeping and decisive victories, the American people have rebuked the depravity, corruption, and incompetence of the failed lame-duck president, Donald J. Trump." This was, perhaps, most dramatically obvious in the repudiation of specifically Trump-favored candidates - e.g., Ken Paxton, Vivek Ramaswamy, Darline Graham.

If "it's the economy, stupid," as James Carville famously claimed, then the Trump-induced economic distress due to Trump's tariffs and Trump's unwanted war have resoundingly registered with voters. In part, Trump was re-elected in 2024 as a protest against Biden's inflation and because of rosy recollections of the good economy in Trump's first term. Now, it was Trump's turn to be blamed for economic distress - distress exacerbated by the sense that the issues salient to voters were simply being ignored in favor of Trump's personal priorities (e.g., his redecoration of Washington, DC) and the apparent enrichment of himself and his family. 

Tariffs, war, and ICE! Trump delivered on his promise to secure the border, something broadly desired and favored by voters. His administration's overreach on domestic immigration enforcement, while it should have been expected, seems to have been unexpected by may Trump voters - including many Latinos - who displayed their disapproval in this vote.

Having next to nothing to offer the voters, the Republicans resorted to tired culture-war tropes, which obviously didn't work. Perhaps, what we have developing is a new kind of culture war -  the politics of anger, resentment, bullying, harassment, performative cruelty, and exclusion vs. a politics of hope. aspiration, community, and "Love-your-neighbor" inclusion.

What next?

it is a tired truism that the 2028 Presidential primary campaign commences today. The victorious Democrats will have a good number of attractive potential candidates to consider a presidential run. That campaign can be the stage on which will be played the intensifying ideological battle within the Democratic party between the more "progressive" and more mainstream Democrats. The only reason the Democrats will have a congressional majority is the election of "moderate" mainstream candidates like Roy Cooper, John Ossoff, James Talarico, Adam Hamilton, Josh Shapiro, etc.

The ideological civil war within the Democratic party will also be fought in Congress. As noted above, the size of the Democratic majority may diminish the ability of the ideological extreme to hold the rest of the party hostage as the "Freedom Caucus" was able to do to the Republicans. In the Senate, it is possible that Senator-elect Sayed may become the Democrats' disliked version of Ted Cruz. Time will tell.

President Trump has already threatened to use his veto, but. he has also sent signals of willingness to deal with the Democratic Congress. How effectively - dysfunctionally - Trump uses his lame-duck status remains to be seen. Here too time will tell.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, there is also danger here for the Democrats. The first, more obvious danger is that they may misinterpret a successful electoral outcome too favorably. That is what President Biden and Democrats allegedly did in 2022. That year the Democrats over-performed, but the vote was almost certainly not an endorsement of the Biden Administration. Yet that was how Biden and the Democrats apparently interpreted it. 

A second danger is that voters have rejected Trump and the Republicans because they have governed so badly. They have handed Congress over to the Democrats wanting them to do better. But can they? Do they have a coherent enough policy agenda to address voters' real concerns, and can that policy agenda actually be implemented? Will they even try, or will they fritter away their control of congress in intra-party squabbles and endless publicity stunt investigations or (even worse) impeachments? “Don’t be impeaching anybody,” Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois recently said. “Let’s just get back to work.” That sounds like good political advice.

Photo: Election Day, Norman Rockwell, The Saturday Evening Post, 1944.

God's Silence at Halloween

 

Saturday, our regular "community night" coincided with Halloween, in honor of which several of us watched Ingmar Bergman's classic 1957 film, The Seventh Seal. I first saw The Seventh Seal (along with some of Bergman's other early religiously themed movies) back in my undergraduate college days, when I was living in Chelsea (then a relatively inexpensive,  diverse, multi-class New York City neighborhood, unlike what it has since become. In that sense, today's Chelsea neighborhood is a metaphor for our country in this Reagan-Trump era). Bergman was very fashionable then, and the artsy Elgin theater on the corner of 8th Avenue and 19th Street showed his films somewhat regularly. It was part of the wider cultural horizon I was discovering and exploring in those days, while at the same time it connected (however ambivalently) with the long-term religious concerns that perpetually permeated my personal and intellectual investigations then and now.

The Seventh Seal is certainly not a typical contemporary Halloween movie. It is not a horror film, although it may seem somewhat scary in parts and in its style of presentation. It is certainly frightening in its ultimate implication - the fear that there is only "emptiness under the moon." Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007), the son of a Lutheran minister who also served as chaplain to the King of Sweden, directed multiple movies, many of which were religiously themed or displayed intense religious resonances. The Seventh Seal is set in late medieval Sweden during the traumatic period of the Bubonic Plague ("the Black Death"). It stars Max von Sydow as Antonius Block, a Swedish knight returning (with his squire, Jöns) from the Crusades. While searching for meaning in a seemingly doomed world, Block meets and eventually plays chess with Death (played by Bengt Ekerot), presumably in an attempt to delay his own death. The film's title is based on the biblical Book of Revelation's "seventh seal," referenced both in the opening narration and again near the conclusion of the film. When the Lamb broke open the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour (Revelation 8:1). The silence that follows the opening of the seal in the biblical narrative presumably reflects one of the film's central themes, God's "silence," (although the divine "silence" experienced in the film is potentially permanent and signifies a meaninglessness quite alien to the biblical silence).  

A 1969 book by Canadian theologian Arthur Gibson, studying seven of Bergman's religiously themed films, was titled The Silence of God: Creative Response to the Films of Ingmar Bergman (Harper and Row). It is interesting to reread Gibson's take on The Seventh Seal, some 50+ years later and try to compare how I react to it now near the end of life versus when I read him in my youth. The same might be said for the movie itself, watching the film now, a half-century later, with all that has happened since then both in our world and in my own life after decades of religious community life and ministry. The "Black Plague" so prominent in the unfolding of the film obviously also resonates very differently now after our very recent plague-like experience of covid. That Plague is central to the way the film functions, although it is actually a historical anachronism. Antonius Block has just returned from the crusades, which would put him at the latest at the end of the 13th century (c.1291), while the Plague only reached Europe in 1347. The juxtaposition, however, has symbolic significance. The Crusades were an optimistic expression of European outreach attempting to restore what had been lost to the Islamic conquerers of the Christian Byzantine Empire's territories. Likewise, the post-war decade when The Seventh Seal was produced and the overall pre-covid secular world were expressions of an unparalleled humanistic optimism and confidence in reason, science, technology, and secular society in general. The medieval Plague produced a society seemingly stuck in a moment of despair. Analogously, we need only recall our own collective national nervous breakdown in 2020, that still lingers in our despairing, traumatized politics, completely undoing the optimistic self-confidence of the late 20th century..

Antonius Block's late medieval Sweden was, of course, Catholic. Hence Block's resort to the sacrament of penance (where, unfortunately, his confessor turns out to be his chess-partner Death himself). Bergman, however, was a 20th-century Swedish Protestant in his religious sensibility. So Block becomes a somewhat Luther-like figure, desperately seeking some guarantee of God, searching in his case for an intellectual certainty which will not be provided, a man alone in the universe with no mediating presence able either to reveal God to him or ease his path to God. Regardless of what the film may or may not have originally intended, it can certainly be seen as a depiction of a world without the Incarnation (or more precisely without faith in the Incarnation). Gibson appears to have recognized this. "The response demanded in the Christian dispensation," Gibson rightly recognizes, "is neither the mere intellectual assent to a series of propositions [Gibson's slam against Roman Catholicism] nor yet the blind faith in an unman [his implicit critique of Protestantism], but rather the personal acceptance of a divine person 'made man'." 

in the film, the foil for Block's search for certitude is his squire Jöns, who accepts life as it is - as it presents itself - without further expectations. The interaction between the two is both comic and serious. There is also Joff, the performer, and his family, who represent a purer and simpler, if unquestioning life, and with whom Block finally finds an alternative to his isolation. To Joff in his simplicity and humility, are granted visions, including a beautiful vision of the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child and an alarming vision of the knight playing chess with death, which alerts him to the need for him and his family to escape. 

The Seventh Seal's ending, however, dramatic, does not offer a neat resolution. In contrast, Bergman's 1960 medieval religious film The Virgin Spring (which Gibson does not include in his interpretation of Bergman's religious film) serves up a terrible tragedy, followed by righteous revenge and repentance. In his revenge and repentance, the prime protagonist (also played by Max von Sydow) likewise does not achieve certitude, confessing that he does not understand God, but he reconciles with God and vows to build a church at the sight of the tragedy, a site suddenly transformed into an apparent miraculous divine response. 

Halloween may be a good occasion to see The Seventh Seal, not because of its potential for fright value, but because of what All Hallows' Eve was originally about - the triumph of the grace of Christ as evidenced in the saints - and in contrast to what it has increasingly become - a celebration of a resurgent paganism's challenge to Christianity. In The Seventh Seal, the witch, Tyan, trusts totally in the Devil and in the Devil's power to protect her. If Antonius Block is a metaphor for disillusioned modern rationalism, perhaps Tyan is the true metaphor for modernity's anxious pursuit of demonic power and modernity's restless search for fulfillment in all the wrong places.

All Saints Day

 

Recently, a group of us were discussing our lengthy list of Paulist patrons, and someone suggested that maybe we have too many of them. At that, I remember responding somewhat indignantly, “How can you have too many saints? Aren’t saints an intrinsically good thing?”

 

Well, today’s feast may be the Church’s answer to that question. Today, we celebrate not just this saint or that saint or some saints, but ALL the saints – and there are a lot of them! In his vision, John saw a great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation, race, people, and tongue [Revelation 7:9].

Over at the Sacred Heart altar (photo), we have an amazing display of photos of family and friends who are no longer with us, whose earthly labors have ended, whom we hope to be with again at that great reunion in the kingdom of heaven! It is that great eternal reunion of what we call the communion of saints, which today’s 1st Reading [Revelation 7:2-4, 9-14] portrays and today’s All Saints’ Day solemnity celebrates.

 

In 1887, the founder of the Paulist Fathers and first pastor of this parish, Servant of God Isaac Hecker, wrote in the Paulist magazine: “When, in 1843, I first read in the Catechism of the Council of Trent the doctrine of the communion of saints, it went right home.” The communion of saints had a decisive impact upon young Isaac’s spiritual search, leading him into the Catholic Church a year later.

 

And appropriately so! Indeed, what would we be without the communion of saints?

 

For one thing, church would certainly be a duller place! Just look around! Besides the multiple images of Mary and of our patron, Saint Paul, whose image appears here on my chasuble, just to my right here is the shrine of a great modern Doctor of the Church, Saint Therese of Lisieux, “the Little Flower,” right now accompanied by the recently restored statues of Saint Anthony and Saint Jude. Further down that aisle is an altar honoring an ancient Roman martyr Saint Agnes. Directly across the nave is the altar of a great early missionary Bishop, Saint Patrick, who obeyed Jesus’ command to go and make disciples, even if that meant going outside the comfortable boundaries of the Roman Empire. The altar next to his honors Saint Anne, the mother of Mary and grandmother of Jesus. Meanwhile, portrayed in paintings above those altars and decorating the walls of this church, we see numerous other saints, a mere hint of the multitude we remember today.

 

All Saints Day celebrates that part of the communion of saints known as the “Church Triumphant” – not just the thousands officially recognized as saints by the Church, but ALL the holy men and women, known and unknown, who have attained the goal for which we all aim. Living now with God and praising him forever in heaven, the saints – that great multitude from every nation, race, people, and tongue of whom we just heard– help us by interceding on our behalf, uniting their prayers with ours.

 

The regular reference to and invocation of the saints, not just today but in every Mass, every day, signifies our union, as the still struggling Church on earth, with the triumphant Church in heaven, and reminds us that the Church’s mission in this world is to mirror that heavenly community of angels and saints – and so transform the world according to the hope that is Jesus Christ’s great gift to his Church and the Church’s gift to the world.

 

The beginning of the dark winter season, the eve of November 1 was once imagined as a frightening in-between time when the spirits of the dead might roam about and possibly even try to haunt their old homes. Bonfires and jack-o-lanterns were part of the defense of the living against an assault from the other world.

 

Deliberately celebrated on this day after Halloween, All Saints Day celebrates the hope that replaces fear and the victory of grace over sin, exemplified in the lives of the saints and experienced by us here and now in our continued relationship with them – a communion which challenges that great opponent of human hope, death, by connecting us with all who have gone before us with the sign of faith.

Homily for All Saints Day, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, November 1, 2026.

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.