A Revolutionary Life

Saint Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) must surely be one of the Church's most popular saints. But 2026 has been proclaimed a Franciscan Jubilee year (commemorating the 800th anniversary of the saint's death). So even more attention may be expected to be focused on Francis this year. In this expectation, I have turned to an already quarter-century old contribution to the Francis story, Adrian House, Francis of Assisi: A Revolutionary Life (Paulist Press, 2001).

House firmly situates Francis well within the context of the medieval society he inhabited, a society so seemingly (unlike ours) in harmony 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). The reader encounters traditional aristocrats and peasants, as well as the rising urban bourgeoisie, especially the emerging communes in rising Italian city-states, like Assisi. The chronology is complex, as was the era being recounted, an era of big personalities like Pope Innocent III and Emperor Frederick II Stupor Mundi.

For all the secular history, however, the focus of the book remains always on one person Francis - Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone (1181-1226) - Saint Francis of Assisi, il poverello, who, 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 two stories. It is, 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 second story is that of his followers, those who came to form the three 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 oversimplification. House at times indulges in this oversimplified paradigm, while also recognizing its interpretive inadequacy. 

As his contemporaries 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 Franciscans - 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 and Francis' own unique gifts.

House commendably does well at navigating this complicated reality. He concedes that the "decisions to release the friars from their vow of absolute poverty, so as to sustain the momentum of their growth, and to build a monument to Francis which he never would have wanted, may have been wrong. Or, since the order still thrives and millions of people visit Assisi each year, it may have been right." Indeed, he recognizes Francis' "lasting achievement" in the lives of the Friars, the Poor Clares, and the Third Order "dedicated to the aims of the founders all over the world."

The author also desires to relate Francis' story as much as possible to more universal and non-Christian themes. While commendable, this effort seems at times strained and overdone - most especially in the distracting employment of Jungian language and imagery. That quibble conceded, this account is a fine introduction and/or rediscovery of the treasure the Church has received in the ever exciting story of Saint Francis.

(Blessed) Fulton Sheen

It's official at last! The Beatification of Archbishop Fulton Sheen (1895-1979), postponed several years ago, has finally gotten approval to move forward. “This is a great moment for the local church in Peoria, for the church here in the United States and for the church universal,” Bishop Louis Tylka of Peoria said in an interview on Monday, February 9, after he had been informed by the Holy See that Archbishop Sheen can now proceed to beatification.

Exactly 74 years ago today, on February 12, 1952, speaking from a set in the Adelphi Theater on West 54th Street in New York City, the soon-to-be Blessed Bishop Fulton J. Sheen  premiered his new TV show Life Is Worth Living. Having already hosted a radio; program for 20 years, Sheen was now breaking experimental ground in a new Roman Catholic outreach to the broader American society via the (then) very new medium of television. Sheen's show won an Emmy in 1953 (beating both Edward R. Murrow and Lucille Ball) and ran until 1957, regularly drawing as many as 30 million viewers. 

I was not one of them. My family had bought our first television in 1952, several months after Sheen's premiere performance. But my parents preferred watching Milton Berle. The first time I ever recall seeing Sheen on TV was a special show he did on the occasion of the coronation of Pope Saint John XXIII in 1958. That said, even without me and my family in the audience, Sheen's program was amazingly successful. It was the most high-profile pubic presentation of Catholic faith at the time, presenting it in a way which was resonant with the dramatically changing post-war national culture and the new style of religion that spoke to that culture. Thus, Will Herberg, in his classic Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Doubleday, 1955) famously saw Sheen as a major mediator of Roman Catholicism's new post-war status as part of "the national consensus as one of the three versions of the 'American Way of Life'."

TV was new in 1952. Sheen was not. He already had a reputation as a serious academic, a successful convert-maker, a famous preacher both in the pulpit and on NBC's weekly Sunday-night radio broadcast, The Catholic Hour. Television, however, made Sheen one of the primary representatives of American public religion. Sheen himself took particular satisfaction in how his program both improved the Church's public image and led to greater inter-religious understanding among Catholic and non-Catholic Americans. Yet, as Church Historian Mark S. Massa has noted  in Catholics and American Culture: Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, and the Notre Dame Football Team (Crossroads, 1999), "Sheen remained a committed devotee of Thomistic ultramontanism. Sheen never wavered in his firm faith that Catholicism provided the best - and very possibly the only - answer to the question of human existence." Thus, Sheen's seemingly "nondenominational 'inspirational' chats" in fact were "profoundly Catholic reflections on the cultural state of the American union," a "natural law Thomism" that "sounded not far from the up-beat, 'can do' spirituality just then claiming the American religious mainstream in books, movies, and state of the union addresses."

Likewise Conservative columnist Ross Douthat, in Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (Free Press, 2012), recalled Sheen as "a courtly and more intellectual version of Billy Graham," who like Graham was "turning the new mass media to Christian ends" and "understood his era perfectly," while arguing, as an American Catholic apologist, that the Catholic Church was "a better custodian of American values than many of its secular critics." (Graham himself once called Sheen “the greatest communicator of the 20th century.”) 

As so often happens, short-term personality conflicts trumped long-term interests, and Sheen eventually left Life Is Worth Living (and New York's most prominent pulpit) apparently as a result of opposition from New York's then very powerful Archbishop, Francis Cardinal Spellman. Sheen was famously welcomed back to Saint Patrick's pulpit by Spellman's kindly successor, Terence Cardinal Cook. And Sheen remained relatively active into his final years. I finally did get to hear him speak live in the mid-1970s when he came to preach at the Princeton University Chapel.

Sheen's beatification later this year will, first and foremost, be an acknowledgment by the Church of his reputation for heroic sanctity and his intercessory power, (On July 6, 2019, Pope Francis formally approved a miracle attributed to the Archbishop Sheen's intercession. This miracle involved the unexplained recovery of a stillborn infant, James Fulton Angstrom, in Peoria in 2010.) It also serves to remind us of the ever present need for the Church to use whatever tools an age provides to fulfill it eternal mandate to evangelize the entire human world.

After the Super Bowl

Like many (maybe most) Americans, I spent much of Sunday evening at a Super Bowl "party." Personally, I couldn't care less about football. So, like many others, I barely paid any attention to the game itself. (Even some of the football fans, who were present, proclaimed the game part of the evening to be at best boring). For most of us, the really big event was the eagerly anticipated, much hyped in advance, Apple Music Half-Time Show, featuring the super popular Puerto Rican performer and recent Grammy award winner Bad Bunny (Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio). Bad Bunny is one of the most popular - most widely streamed - musical performers in the world. Being admittedly largely out of touch in regard to much of popular music and entertainment culture, I was unfamiliar with Bad Bunny's music until recently. But, of course, I wasn't quite the target audience!

As an entertainment experience, Bad Bunny's Half-Time Show was fabulous. It was exuberant and joyful, a genuine celebration of life and togetherness (complete with a real wedding), and a glorious expression of Puerto Rican culture and music, the first Super Bowl half-Time show almost entirely in Spanish. In one sense, it was not overtly political. (Trump was never mentioned by name.) As everything has become in our conflicted current era, however, the show was inevitably political, precisely for its celebration of the diversity of American society and its evocation of the many nations that share this singular American continent, not to mention the not so subtle significance of the performing sugar cane workers climbing electrical poles!

The multi-cultural, multi-racial reality of American society is a fundamental fact which one can either celebrate or lament. Some obviously may have chosen to lament, but they are inevitably the poorer for it.  The insinuation that the performer (who is, of course, an American citizen) and the Spanish-language performance were somehow "un-American," only highlights the absurd racial exclusiveness that - to some - masquerades as American patriotism. Meanwhile, the rest of America just enjoyed the party.

Karl Marx famously called religion the heart of a heatless world, the spirit of spiritless dominions, the opiate of the people. Whatever one wants to make of Marx's infamous claim regarding religion, the opiate of the people role has long ago been assumed by football. Expanding the religion of football's reach into diverse latino markets is obviously part of the industry's business plan. Roger Goodell's very public embrace of Bad Bunny only highlighted that business plan's strategic sense. Not for the first time, however, has a narrowly shrunken exclusive distortion of the American dream been undermined the very same greedy capitalism it professes to endorse.

The Super Bowl may no longer be - if it ever really was - the great unifying patriotic event it has at times pretended to be. Neither - as was so sadly also displayed recently - is the National Prayer Breakfast.  So many of our once supposedly culturally unifying national events have lost their purported luster. 

But the universal aspirations Americans have long valued, lived, and celebrated still survive - and sing in Spanish.

Photo: Bad Bunny performs during the Super Bowl LX halftime show (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images).

A City upon a Hill

A city set on a mountain – or, as traditionally translated - a city upon a hill.

What images does that call to mind for us as Americans?

Barack Obama in 2006, Ronald Reagan in 1980, John F. Kennedy in 1961.

All of them, of course, were referencing the first Governor of colonial Massachusetts John Winthrop's use of Jesus' words in 1630, in his famous sermon, A Model of Christian Charity, which warned his fellow immigrants as they were about to start their new nation in America:

For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. … We shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are a going.

What a warning, indeed!

And how, we well might ask, has it turned out in this city upon a hill, in this now big and immensely rich and powerful - perhaps too rich and too powerful - country about to celebrate its 250th birthday?

Winthrop’s words were a warning – not a boast or a brag. So they must be for us. Jesus himself was warning – or, perhaps, we might prefer to say challenging – us to do what it takes to make the city’s light shine. Centuries earlier, Isaiah warned what we need to do: remove from your midst oppression, false accusation and malicious speech; bestow your bread on the hungry and satisfy the afflicted; then light shall rise for you in the darkness, and the gloom shall become for you like midday.

So, if our country seems so exceptionally gloomy right now, we should know why.

Back in 1630, John Winthrop instructed his compatriots on what it would take to make this city upon a hill shine: We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.

But what have we as a nation done instead? Not that obviously! Nor much of what Jesus in his great Sermon on the Mount commands us. Last week we heard Jesus’ introduce his invitation to join his kingdom, his Beatitudes. No politician is lobbying to post the Beatitudes in schoolrooms. But the Beatitudes and Jesus’ follow-up warnings about salt and light and being a city upon a hill are at the heart of Jesus’ challenge to the rich and powerful alternative kind of city we have become instead.

In a world which admires the rich and glorifies their scandalous misbehaviors, it is the poor whom Jesus has pronounced blessed. In a country which unleashes armed violence against its own citizens, it is those who mourn their murdered neighbors in Minneapolis who are pronounced blessed. Amidst an obsession with unjust power, domination, and control, it is those who hunger and thirst for justice for their immigrant neighbors who are pronounced blessed.

In his The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith famously warned that the virtually universal human tendency, the "disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and powerful, and to despise or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition" is the "great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments."

Membership in the kingdom of God, the only true city upon a hill, both challenges those virtually universal sentiments and the behaviors they inspire, and also invites us and directs us and enables us to change – to change ourselves and to change our world, one person at a time, one day at a time.

As we sang together at Saint Patrick's Cathedral a few days ago on the eve of our new Archbishop’s installation: Shame our wanton selfish gladness, Rich in things and poor in soul, Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, Lest we miss thy kingdom’s goal.

Homily for the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, February 8, 2026. (Isaiah 58:7-10; Matthew 5:13-16).

Photo: President-elect John F. Kennedy's "City upon a Hill" speech, Massachusetts legislature, January 9, 1961.

Ronald our Bishop

Saint Patrick's Cathedral was freezing cold yesterday afternoon, but the capacity crowd was full of faith and warmed by hope, as we celebrated Solemn Vespers led by our new Archbishop, Ronald A, Hicks, who will be canonically installed later today as the 11th Archbishop of New York at what promises to be a magnificent manifestation of the life of this local Church. The motto below the shield in our new Archbishop's Coat of Arms is Paz y Bien, Spanish for "Peace and Good," a phrase attributed to Saint Francis, emphasizing how true peace and all good come to us from Christ. The use of Spanish in his motto recalls Archbishop Hicks' five years in El Salvador (2005-2010) and the contemporary make-up of the American Catholic faithful. It was with these words that he began his first homily from the pulpit of this city's great cathedral. 

I suppose becoming a Bishop anywhere in the Church today entails a multitude of challenges. Certainly, becoming Archbishop of this storied city and sprawling archdiocese must be an especially challenging undertaking, which can only make sense when one trusts totally in the  power and presence of our merciful God, who has promised to be with his Church through it all. With joyful trust and grateful confidence in God's gracious promises, the entire Church of New York, in union with Leo our Pope and Ronald our Bishop, prays today that God's grace with be abundantly poured out upon our new shepherd as he begins to guide us through the stormy paths that lie ahead.

As we all sang together with our new Archbishop yesterday afternoon, From the fears that long have bound us, Free our hearts to faith and praise. Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, For the living of these days.