Between Yes and No

A man had two sons.

Now that is a story that we have heard before! Perhaps the most famous of Jesus’ parables is about a man who had two sons – a younger son, cool and adventurous, who seems to get away with everything, an older son, dull and dutiful, who feels forever unloved and underappreciated.

We all know that story. This one is a little different. Here both sons change their minds. The first son refuses at first to obey his father, then changes his mind and does as asked. (in religious language, we call that change of heart, “repentance.”) The second son says “Yes,” but then refuses to do his father’s will.

The two sons are caricatures, of course. Don’t most of us, most of the time, feel a bit like a combination of both? Like King Herod, who famously liked to listen to John the Baptist and was obviously attracted by his words, but beheaded him anyway, most of us are attracted to virtue - except when we’re not. We’re all tempted at times to do what we know we shouldn’t – or not do what we know we should do.  Sometimes we resist such temptation. Sometimes we don’t. Isn’t that the story of human history? Is it any surprise the world is such a mess, because human behavior is such a moral mess?

Given a choice, Jesus seems to come down on the side of the second son. He praises the tax collectors and prostitutes - stereotypical examples of wrong behavior – who (unlike Herod and unlike some of the people in Jesus’ audience) listened to John and changed their ways and so are entering the kingdom of God.

For Jesus, clearly the kingdom of God is about change, change of mind and heart (again, what in religious language, is called repentance). We forever seem to be in the moral mess of the present, somewhere between Yes and No. But – and this is what makes the difference – we are not stuck there. We can, in Jesus’ words, change our minds and believe. We are all on different paths, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. The point, however, is not where we are, but where we will end up.

America used to be known as the land of second chances. That may or may not be so true anymore. But, in telling us this parable about the two sons, Jesus makes clear that the Christian life still is. Jesus does not want us to focus forever on our first response, on our initial (and however often repeated) failures; but rather to do like the first son and change.

The kingdom of God is about who God wants us to become. The challenge is stay focused on who we want to be, on where we want our story to end, and so not to stay stuck in the present.

 

Homily for the 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY.

Blessed Fulton Sheen

 

At long last, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen (1895-1979) will finally be beatified today at The Dome at America's Center in St. Louis, Missouri, at a Mass celebrated by Luis Cardinal Antonio Tagle as the Papal Delegate, Pope Leo's representative. Beatification is the final major step before canonization. From today forward, therefore, Fulton Sheen will be addressed and referred to as "Blessed" and will have his day in the calendar when he will be venerated in certain particular places.

Originally ordained a priest of the Peoria (Illinois) Diocese in 1919, Sheen eventually went on to teach theology and philosophy from 1928 to 1950 at Washington, D.C.'s Catholic University. Before that, after finishing his studies at that same Catholic University, he had earned his Ph.D. at the Catholic University of Louvain (now Leuven) in Belgium in 1923. His doctoral dissertation was "The Spirit of Contemporary Philosophy and the Finite God". Sheen became the first American to win the Cardinal Mercier Prize for international Philosophy. 

From 1930 to 1950, he hosted a night-time radio program The Catholic Hour on NBC. His fame skyrocketed after he moved to television in 1952, where he hosted Life Is Worth Living until 1957. The program featured Bishop Sheen speaking extemporaneously before a live audience and using a blackboard. The show was in primetime and attracted a mass audience - competing with "Mr. Television" Milton Berle! (My parents watched Milton Berle, not Bishop Sheen) Finally from 1961 to 1968, he hosted the syndicated The Fulton Sheen Program. Sheen won an Emmy Award for Most Outstanding Television Personality, and was featured on the cover of Time. 

As a radio and TV personality, Sheen was noted for his anti-communism (a commonplace Catholic position at the time). In the 1960s, however, he also spoke out against the Vietnam War, which cost him considerably in popularity. Along with communism, he also attacked Freudian psychoanalysis for what he saw as its materialistic premises and was a strong critic of modern therapeutic culture.

In 1950, Sheen became the National Director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. During his 16 years as the Propagation's director, Sheen raised millions of dollars for missionary efforts worldwide. (He also donated $10 million that he earned from his later television programs.) In 1951, Pope Pius XII appointed Sheen as an Auxiliary Bishop for New York, an office he held until 1966, when he was made Bishop of Rochester. His tenure there was challenging, and he resigned Rochester in 1969 and was made Titular Archbishop of Newport (Wales). 

In the late 1950s, the U.S. government donated millions of dollars' worth of powdered milk to the New York Archdiocese. Francis Cardinal Spellman, New York's powerful archbishop from 1939 through 1967, donated that milk to Sheen's Society for the Propagation of the Faith to distribute to the poor of the world. On at least one occasion, however, Spellman demanded that Sheen pay the Archdiocese for the donated milk. Sheen refused and took his case directly to the Pope. Supposedly, Spellman later confronted Sheen and and promised to "get even" with him. Besides being pressured to leave television,  Spellman famously canceled Sheen's annual Good Friday sermons at Saint Patrick's Cathedral, and Sheen found himself unwelcome in many New York churches, enduring a true trial and crucible of suffering at the hands of fellow churchmen. Sheen himself humbly never talked about his quarrel with Spellman.

Although my family did not watch Bishop Sheen in the 1950s, I certainly heard plenty about him and eventually saw some of his later shows. I vividly remember his TV programs on the occasion of the death of the Pope and the election of his successor. As a child, I remember reading a book, a commentary on the Mass, which featured photos of Sheen celebrating Mass in his private chapel. I only finally heard him in person, late in his life, when he came to preach at the ecumenical Sunday service in the Princeton University chapel. His impact on the U.S. Church in his time had been enormous. He can be considered one of the first televangelists and certainly pioneered the Catholic Church's engagement with modern media as a vehicle for evangelization and cultural efficacy. When Pope Saint John Paul II embraced him at Saint Patrick's Cathedral just months before his death, the Pope assured him that he had written and spoken well of the Lord and was a true son of the Church.

His cause for canonization was delayed by an unseemly tussle between the Archdiocese of New York and the Diocese of Peoria about possession of Sheen's body, which was originally interred in Saint Patrick's Cathedral in 1979. In 2016, the New York State Supreme Court ordered Sheen disinterred and returned to Peoria, a ruling reaffirmed by the Appellate Division in 2018. This enabled Peoria to continue pursuing Sheen's Cause, culminating finally in his long awaited beatification today.

On the occasion of the canonization of a 16th-century Spanish Augustinian saint, the then Augustinian Prior General, Robert F. Prevost (Pope Leo XIV), said: "On canonizing a saint, the Church does not only wish to give us a reason for joy and celebration; she wishes above all to praise the Lord, to recognize the working of his grace in the Saint, and to propose to everyone in him a model of life and of Christian commitment."

Blessed Fulton Sheen, outstanding preacher of God's word in the modern world, pray for us!

Autumn

 

Autumn arrives at precisely 8:05 p.m. tonight with the Autumn Equinox. This will be the moment when the sun is positioned directly above the equator. Daylight and night will be equal in length (hence "equinox"). After the equinox, however, the sun's position will gradually move southward. Here in the northern hemisphere, the daylight hours will grow shorter, and the night hours will grow measurably longer. Meanwhile, while summer temperatures may linger for a longer or shorter period of time, sooner or later cooler weather will prevail until by the date of the December solstice (December 21) cold winter weather will, at least normally, be firmly predominant. I eagerly look froward to the day when I will routinely require a coat to go outside! It is this intermediate season, starting warm, ending cold, gradually getting darker, that we call Autumn or Fall.

The word "Fall" highlights one of the more attractive features of this season, as the leaves of deciduous trees change in color from their chlorophyll-induced spring-summer green to bright variations of yellow, orange, and red, and then literally fall to the ground. 

The culturally promoted, elite perspective on the change of seasons is, of course to deplore all this, to lament the fading of summer and the proximate approach of winter. I dissent from all of that. In climates where there are distinct rainy and dry seasons (like the ancient Middle East), the return of rain in autumn represents a renewal of nature in a dry, weary land without water [Psalm 63:1] after the deadly dryness and heat of summer. There are places (California, for example), which (like Israel) have a Mediterranean desert climate and are dependent on the winter rainy season for sufficient water to sustain human and animal life and agricultural production for the summer dry season, when no rain is normally expected. Hence, it is no surprise that autumn is treated as the beginning of a new year in the Jewish calendar. (Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish "New Year," was celebrated 10 days ago.)

I have lived most of my life in places with predictably regular rainfall, where in most non-drought years it rains on-and-off all year long. So autumn's new beginning for me has usually been more social than meteorological - associated with the beginning of the new school year in the academic calendar, a calendar which has tended to set the tone for much of society even for those whose school years are long behind them.

When I was a student (and likewise when I was very briefly a professor) the beginning of the academic year represented for me the much anticipated resumption of normal social activities. Since this pattern likewise largely dominates American parish life, the school calendar and its autumn beginning have been a focal point for me for almost my entire life. Inevitably, September elicits in me an enthusiastic response and the promise of a new start - probably the way the annual seasonal resumption of college football plays a similar role in many more people's lives.

Nothing is ever quite so simple, of course, or so univocal. Autumn is indeed a new beginning, a bright start. But it also, for obvious reasons, has a certain end times feel about it, as the annual dying of the natural world is vividly enacted before our eyes. (That beautiful foliage is in fact dying foliage!) 

The dying of the natural world inevitably acquires more significance for those of us who are old and acutely aware that the sum of our years is seventy, or if we are strong eighty, and most of them are toil and trouble, for their quickly pass and we vanish [Psalm 90:10]. As I said one Advent some years ago, what we see is the end of the natural world, but what we feel and fear is the end of ourselves. So the same season that gives us football tailgate parties and a multitude of variations on the theme of Oktoberfest also sends sobering signals both big and small.

Both autumnal themes symbolically represented both by dead leaves refreshing autumn rains, and are united in the paradoxical language of faith. "Our weakness bears us down, but our faith bears us up. We sorrow over the human condition, but find our healing in the divine promise." [Saint Augustine, Sermon 172].

Festa!

 

This week, legions of tourists and others with money to spend have been pouring into the downtown Manhattan neighborhood which is still somewhat anachronistically labelled "Little Italy" for the  Festa di San Genaro. In the traditional Roman Catholic calendar, September 19 has long been observed as the feast of Saint Januarius (San Gennaro, in Italian), Bishop of Benevento, martyred c. 305 along with six others during the persecution of Emperor Diocletian, the last serious Roman persecution prior to the conversion of Constantine. His relics eventually made their way to Naples, where for centuries, San Gennaro's body has reposed in the Cathedral of Naples. As patron of that city, he continues to be invoked for protection from fire, earthquakes, and the ever-present threat from Mount Vesuvius. 

In the early 20th century, the massive wave of Neapolitan immigrants from one of the poorest regions of the newly created Kingdom of Italy to America made devotion to San Gennaro a popular part of immigrant Italian life in New York City - in the neighborhood that then really was "Little Italy" (and where my mother was born 104 years ago). 

The still popular street festival originated on Mulberry street on September 19, 1926. By 1930, there were 440,250 Italian-born New Yorkers - including all my grandparents and several of my aunts and uncles. As strangers in a foreign land, Italian immigrants faced all the challenges - and opportunities - inherent in immigration. As Catholics, they faced the added challenge of being perceived primarily as a problem by an unwelcoming, predominantly Irish ecclesiastical establishment. As much as anything else, the New York Italian street festivals celebrated an alternative quality of community experience. While the establishment lamented what the immigrants didn't do, the festa demonstrated who they were at heart.

The one-day festa eventually expanded into today's 11-day street fair and a major tourist attraction - New York's biggest and most famous street festival and a great place to go for sausage and zeppole - a combination carnival and charity fundraiser. Operated by a not-for profit community organization, the contemporary festa distributes donations to various charitable organizations. Today's money-spending, sausage and zeppole consuming tourists may know little and may care even less about San Gennaro and his miraculous intercession against volcanic eruptions, but  even now the festa still features a religious procession on the actual feast day, an authentic expression of an immigrant community's heart and the spiritual strength that sustained the struggle of the Italian immigrant experience.

Meanwhile, back in Naples on his feast day, a silver bust containing the head of the saint and a glass reliquary containing a solidified sample of the saint's blood are exposed for veneration. Led by a group of women, called zie di San Gennaro,  the people pray for the famous miracle of the liquefying of his blood. When that happens, the ritual announcement is made to the great joy of all, Il sangue si è sciolto, Il miracolo e fatto ("The blood has liquefied. The miracle has happened"). The Te Deum is then sung, and the reliquary is made available to be kissed by the people. San Gennaro's blood traditionally also liquefies on the Saturday before the first Sunday of May to commemorate the transfer of his relics to Naples and again on December 16, the anniversary of the day in 1631 when a flow of lava from Mount Vesuvius miraculously bypassed the city - thanks, it was believed, to the saint's intercession.

The presence of Mount Vesuvius - a mere 9 miles from the center of Naples, highlights the paradox of Naples, a vibrant, exciting city, on a beautiful bay, in a setting of of incomparable natural beauty, blessed with fertile volcanic soil, but forever threatened by one of nature's most dangerous and unpredictable destructive forces. In a sense, Naples is like a parable of life itself - the blessings and dangers of ordinary human life on earth as well as of the spiritual journey through life on earth to the kingdom of God. How fitting then that the Neapolitans turn so regularly to a saint who has already passed through the blessings and dangers of this life to assist them as they struggle to do the same! 

Image: Flag of the Kingdom of Italy, 1861-1946.

The Uprising (The Movie)

 

The Uprising is a 2026 action film written, produced, and directed by Paul Greenglass and starring Andrew Garfield as the "Ploughman." It is a cinematic dramatization of the 1381 English "Peasants' Revolt" (historically more accurately termed "Wat Tyler's Rebellion") which occurred in the aftermath of the Bubonic Plague ("the Black Death") that had killed off half the country's population, starting in June 1348. The violent events of 1381 have long been considered a major crisis moment in English history.

In 1381, England's king was the 14-year-old Richard II, too young to rule on his own, although he did in fact play a prominent part in the rebellion's actual events. In the film he (Woody Norman) is haunted by terrifying nightmares, which in some sense reflect the haunting of the entire realm in the aftermath of the plague (referred to in the film as "the sickness"). He has an ambivalent relationship with his aristocratic council, which governs in his name, as does his mother, Joan of Kent (Katherine Waterston). Meanwhile, in addition to the economic dislocations caused by the plague, England is engaged in the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453) with France and desperately needs more revenue, requiring an increase in taxes. Unable politically to tax the Church or the rising merchant class in London, the royal council (composed apparently of nobles and bishops) increases taxes on the peasants, who complain to the local tax collector that they can no longer survive if they have to pay higher taxes.

Enter a "Ploughman" (Andrew Garfield), a widowed farmer whose wife and children had died in the plague. The collector demands that the Ploughman pay death taxes again on his family since he lacks documentary proof of their death seven years prior. The enraged Ploughman accosts the tax collector, and kills a soldier who tries to arrest him. This inspires peasants' revolts across the country, led by the Ploughman and actual historical characters from 1381 - a former soldier Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis), and a previously imprisoned, apparently apocalyptically inclined priest, John Ball (Jamie Bell). The rebels march on London, where complete chaos erupts, while the rebels (mainly the Ploughman) negotiate with the King, whom the rebels treat with the veneration that his sacred status confers and that somehow sets him apart from the hated rich. Richard apparently gives in to the rebels and seems to betray his Council. In the end he seems to ally with the rising merchant class, represented by the Lord Mayor of London. The King then betrays the peasants and has Wat Tyler killed. Many of the rebels are massacred, but the Ploughman and a handful of associates escape.

One year later, the king and his mother are traveling through the forest when they are ambushed by the Ploughman and his fellow outlaws. Ultimately the Ploughman spares the King's life, leaving him to live in fear. The film ends with the King haunted as he was at the beginning. This fictional ending seems to evoke the legend of Robin Hood, who, however, historically predated these events by almost two centuries. (Historically, Richard II was ultimately deposed in 1399 by Henry IV, which remotely set the stage for the later Wars of the Roses)

The 14th-century aftermath of the plague was a period of economic dislocation and political transition. The merging merchant class were perhaps the prime beneficiaries (as the film suggests), although historically the peasants also benefited since their reduced numbers increased their power as an economic class, despite repeated legal efforts to keep them in their previous subordinate status. Their violent revolt was a long-remembered component of the chaos that occurred at that time. It continues to fascinate historians (especially those given to class analysis). The film avoids overt references to contemporary populist responses to today's economic and political conflicts, and the rebels' veneration of the sacred person of the King keeps the film firmly situated in its medieval ambience. On the other hand, the setting of the story in a haunted world traumatized by plague perhaps gives it a certain resonance in today's traumatized post-pandemic society, similarly haunted by its own versions of elite corruption and populist rage.