Mary in the Temple

Today's feast of The Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary (in the East, The Entry of the Most Holy Theotokos into the Temple). is one of the oldest Marian feasts - if also one of the most historically problematic. The event it ostensibly commemorates is found in the apocryphal Protoevangelium of James, according to which Mary's parents (there identified as Joachim and Anne) brought Mary as a child of three to the Temple to thank God for having at last given them a child and to consecrate her to God. More elaborate versions of the legend suggest she may have remained longer in the Temple as preparation for her exalted role as Mother of God.

What actually did happen on this date in 543 was the dedication of a Byzantine church (The New Church of the Theotokos) near the site of the Jerusalem Temple, the anniversary of which became the commemoration of Mary's legendary presentation as a child in the Temple. In the post-Tridentine liturgical reform of 1568, Pope Saint Pius V suppressed the feast, but popular piety won out and it was soon restored by Pope Sixtus V in 1585. In his 1974 encyclical Marialis Cultus, Pope Saint Paul VI mentioned this feast's "lofty and exemplary values." 

Christianity is in important respects an historically-based religion, in that the principal events in salvation history happened in the course of. human history. However, Christianity transcends mere history, and it is good on occasion to celebrate, as we do today, a non-historical event rich in religious symbolism. Mary's imagined presentation in the Temple highlights her life-long commitment (dogmatically elaborated in the doctrine of her Immaculate Conception) to align herself with God's will and God's great plan for the salvation of the human race. Insofar as Mary is also a symbol of the Church, her lifelong commitment challenged each of us, as members of the Church, to imitate her in our own journey through this life.

Photo: Altar of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY.

1000 Days

It is an artificial kind of marker (like decades and centuries), but the Ukraine War is now 1000 days old. It was 1000 days ago that Russia, under its current Orthodox Tsar Vladimir Putin, launched an imperialist aggressive war against its European neighbor Ukraine - the first such imperialist aggressive war on European territory since 1945. Under the leadership of President Joe Biden, the U.S. and NATO originally responded effectively. Since then, however, Trump's reelection, MAGA isolationism, and a general societal fatigue with "forever wars" have imperiled that response and endangered Ukraine's long-term survival prospects.

While Ukraine has never really been "winning" the war, there was a time when it looked at least as if Ukraine were on the offensive. Now that illusion has been dispelled - as may be the illusion that the United States is a reliable ally. In the "second-guessing" game that inevitably follows any major conflict, it may well be that the Biden Administration has been too slow in supplying needed weaponry to Ukraine, often eventually supplying weapons (like the ATACMS) that might have been better supplied, with more effect, earlier. Whatever the reasoning was, a mistake may have been made in the pace of American military aid. 

What the Biden Administration did do very well was to mobilize European support behind the defense of Ukraine. Europeans, having frittered away the post Cold War "peace dividend" and having for far too long relied too much on the U.S. defensive umbrella, were finally fully awakened to the degree of threat posed by Russian imperialism. Russia's neighbors - Sweden, Finland, the Baltic States, Poland) know from their long history what a dangerous enemy Russia inevitably is. So their awakening seems to have been more complete and effective. Of all of this war's ironies, Putin's goal of undermining NATO led instead to Sweden and Finland joining NATO and the (at least short-term) overall strengthening of that indispensable alliance. Whether Europe can continue to stand up against Putin, now that the U.S. can no longer be relied upon, remains to be seen.

"Advice and Consent"

In his famous treatment in The Federalist 76, of the Senate's role of "Advice and Consent" to presidential appointments, Alexander Hamilton observed that those who will have reflected upon the subject, "in relation to the appointment of the President, will, I presume, agree to the position, that there would always be great probability of having the place supplied by a man of abilities, at least respectable. ... The sole and undivided responsibility of one man will naturally beget a livelier sense of duty and a more exact regard to reputation. He will, on this account, feel himself under stronger obligations, and more interested to investigate with care the qualities requisite to the stations to be filled, and to prefer with impartiality the persons who may have the fairest pretensions to them."

Well, so much for that naive assumption!

In defending the requirement for senatorial confirmation of presidential nominations, Hamilton, who fully expected most such appointments to be confirmed, nonetheless recognized the value of a check upon presidential power. "It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity. In addition to this, it would be an efficacious source of stability in the administration. ... Though it might therefore be allowable to suppose that the Executive might occasionally influence some individuals in the Senate, yet the supposition, that he could in general purchase the integrity of the whole body, would be forced and improbable."

In the more than two centuries which have elapsed since Hamilton and his colleagues persuaded their fellow citizens of the wisdom of our constitutional arrangements, the Senate's "Advice and Consent" function has become one of that body's most highly prized prerogatives and responsibilities.

At least until now!

Confronted with certain cabinet nominations that can be characterized as unqualified and dangerous, the Senate that will convene in January will be tested as seldom in American history. Four Republican Senators would have to vote against a nomination for it to fail to receive the requisite confirmation. In an earlier era, that might be easily imagined. And it might yet happen, but it is easier to imagine the opposite - a Senate majority so compliant to the demands of its party's leader that this precious prerogative may be irresponsibly surrendered.

To obviate even this relatively remote possibility, the Administration has raised the possibility of recess appointments. If the Senate voluntarily adjourns to facilitate that - or if it confirms the nominees the normal way to avoid the humiliation of colluding in recess appointments - either way, yet another valued constitutional check will be abandoned, another bad precedent set, and the Senate's minimal moral legitimacy further eroded.

Recess Appointments, it should be noted, are a constitutional archaism - appropriate and necessary when Congress met for only a few months during the year and could not be quickly reassembled for this purpose. Now that Congress is in session all year long and can reassemble as quickly as jet planes can transport members, there is no longer any good reason for recess appointments, except as a way of getting around senatorial prerogatives. (That may indeed be desirable in some instances, but hard cases make bad law and can set bad precedents.)

That said, there remains the danger, if the Senate were to stand up to the White House and refuse either to confirm or adjourn, that the House might collude with the Administration by adjourning itself, in which case the President could invoke an obscure - and dangerous - constitutional authorization to adjourn Congress himself "to such time as he shall think proper." That would not only give him his recess appointments, but it would also thoroughly demean Congress as a mere accessory within the MAGA cult.

Our Overaged Constitution

For a long time now, the sheer longevity of the U.S. Constitution has often been held up as one of its greatest merits. It is, after all, the oldest written constitution in the world. Moreover, most western (more or less democratic) states have in fact had multiple constitutions during the 135 years that the U.S. Constitution has been in effect. That latter fact should at least invite the question about whether our overaged Constitution is still completely up to the task - or fit for purpose, as the Brits say. Given the fact that the basics of constitutional and democratic governance may be increasingly at risk in the next presidential term, it may be that much more important to distinguish the Constitution's flaws from its acknowledged virtues.

That our Constitution has lasted this long might have surprised its authors. Thomas Jefferson (who was not one of the Framers) famously thought there should be a revolution every generation. The Founders for the most part were not so radical and certainly valorized stability. That said, I suspect they would be surprised that their constitution has lasted so long in such a very different kind of world. 

In fact, of course, the original Constitution recognized its inherent limitations by providing for amendments. The constitutional amendment process is so cumbersome as to be virtually unusable in today's politically polarized context, but the early republic was smaller and more politically healthy and disposed to constitutional change. Thus, the first 15 years saw 12 amendments, including the all-important "Bill of Rights" and a modification of the already dysfunctional constitutional process for electing presidents.

The next series of constitutional amendments were the Reconstruction Amendments (14-15), which, thanks to a bloody Civil War, radically transformed the Constitution from being state-centric and slavery-tolerant to being somewhat more more federally centered, anti-slavery, and somewhat less anti-democratic. The next spurt of constitutional amending came with the early 20th-century Progressive era. So we got the Income Tax (16), popular election of Senators (17), Prohibition (18), Women's Suffrage (19), and then a little later, the "Lame Duck" Amendment (20), and the repeal of Prohibition (21). Prescinding from Prohibition, these all contributed to the increasingly democratic character of a constitutional system that was originally so much less so. These were vital improvements, which defined the 20th century's political progression.

I regard the 22nd Amendment limiting presidential terms as an unfortunate, anti-democratic regression, but a rather modest one. (In the present circumstances, in fact, the 22nd Amendment may be a prerequisite for salvaging constitutional and democratic governance.) The rest of the post-war amendments, moreover, definitely represented further democratic improvements on the original system - electoral votes for D.C. (23), abolition of poll taxes (24), presidential disability and succession (25), and the 18-year old vote (26). That last great spurt of amending activity reflected the post-New Deal, post-war, increasingly egalitarian and democratic society that the U.S. was then becoming. - and from which it has so dramatically regressed.

The fact that we haven't had any meaningful amendments since 1971 is telling. We have become much too divided a country to accomplish anything so consensual as amending the Constitution. But our polarized politics also highlights the dysfunctionally anti-democratic directions our Constitution makes possible.

Luckily, the recent presidential election did not see another repeat of 2000 and 2016 when the winner lost the popular vote. But, of course, that possibility remains. And, even without that outcome, the electoral college continues its massive distortion of our elections and of presidential campaigns. There is some evidence, for example, of different performance by the candidates in so-called battleground states and in so-called safe states. Trump lost states like New York, of course, but he did significantly better there than expected. and he performed better there than in some battleground states, which suggests that the Harris campaign may have had some effect in those places. Imagine an election in which candidates campaigned in all states, and voters in all states knew that their votes actually mattered! We can't predict exactly what our politics would look like, but we can be confident that it would be very different if we elected our presidents the way we elect other officials, i.e., the way a democracy would do.

The Electoral College was never intended to function as it does now. That fact itself further justifies efforts to replace it. The Senate is another story. The Framers' attraction to the classical idea of a "mixed constitution," which itself has much merit, gave us the Senate as a pseudo-aristocratic check on the democratically elected House. Personally, I regard those aspects of the Senate - such as 6-year terms, staggered tenure, and the Senate's role (very much at risk at the moment) in advising and consenting to appointments and treaties - as positive "checks and balances." Less positive, however, is the Senate's historical birth as a federalist compromise to reflect and represent the inordinate importance of the states. To be fair to the founders, none of them could have anticipated the eventual growth of the United States and thus the absurd disparity between, for example, California and Wyoming. There was no comparable disparity at the time of the founding.

Tragically, there is nothing to be done about the Senate. Certainly, viable alternatives could be imagined which would preserve the original sense of the Senate in a more sensible way. For example, we could divide the country into real regions, which make infinitely more sense than artificial states. A Senate structured to represent individual states more differentially but to represent equally the main regions of the U.S. - Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, Mountain and Prairie states, Far West, and Southwest - might make sense of the Senate, but of course cannot be accomplished.

(The Senate, of course, could at least reform itself somewhat by abolishing the filibuster, which would be a major democratic advance. That would ironically also be more in line with the original sense of the Constitution, which never envisaged the filibuster. If the Republican Senate sees fit to eliminate the filibuster at some point to achieve some aspect of Trump's agenda, that might be tragic in the short term but it would be a long-term good for the country, for which the filibuster has never been anything but an antidemocratic curse.)

The third pseudo-aristocratic component of our outdated Constitution is the Judiciary, specifically the life-tenure of federal judges and Supreme Court Justices, which was part of the original Constitution, and the usurped power of judicial review, which was not. Obviously, judicial reform is also off the table, given our present inability to amend the Constitution.

So whatever a post-Trump liberal reformist agenda will look like, it will remain constrained by these anti-democratic institutional constitutional barricades. All this is especially relevant right now because the Constitution was so designed in large part to be an instrument against tyranny. Yet now it is those problematic elements in the Constitution that are especially salient in diminishing the Constitution's effective ability to be an instrument against tyranny.

At the Gates

 

“When you see these things happening, know that he is near, at the gates.” 

In every period of human history, but especially in times of rapid change and confusion, people have looked for prophecies and predictions and dubious private revelations to explain what was happening to their formerly familiar world - as if that were what Jesus was talking about! For the same Jesus who told his hearers to be on the lookout and to recognize the signs of his coming, also assured them that “of that day or hour, no one knows.”

 

Even so, Jesus challenges his followers to be on the lookout for signs of his kingdom. 

 

So, we need to ask ourselves what things do we see happening in the world right now?

 

We certainly do seem to be in one of those times of rapid change and confusion. We live in situations that “pose new challenges, which, for us at times are difficult to understand.” In this country, we have just had a very contentious polarizing election, in which both sides employed apocalyptic language, and which, while decisive in its result, still leaves our country very divided and many of our fellow citizens very angry at one another.

 

In the Gospel we just heard, Jesus made his ominous predictions just prior to Passover, in the springtime, when the fig tree sprouts leaves, a sure sign that summer is near. It is, however, in the autumn of the year that the Church annually repeats this message. Autumn is the long-awaited and hoped-for season of harvest, when the year’s work finds fulfillment in our season of thanksgiving. 

Harvest, however, also marks an end. In nature, November vividly anticipates both the eventual end of the natural world and the eventual end of each individual. The Church recaptures for us that natural cyclical mood, as it recalls Christ’s warning words about the end, when the Son of Man coming in the clouds with great power and glory will send out the angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the end of the earth to the end of the sky. 

 

And so we wait – not just for the end of the world, but for our own individual end, which inevitably gets closer all the time. And it is precisely how we wait that identifies what following Jesus in the world is all about.

 

For following Jesus is not about pinpointing that day or hour. Nor is it about trying to identify in advance which of our neighbors shall live forever and which shall be in everlasting horror and disgrace. On the contrary, following Jesus is all about the how in the now – how we live and what we love in the here and now, what we make of this interval, whether it be long or short, until the end – in other words, the durability and quality of our commitment and our faithfulness to him and to one another for the duration. That’s what matters most over the long haul and will determine who we will be for all eternity. That is the wisdom which shall shine like the splendor of the firmament and lead many to justice.

 

Meanwhile, we are fortified for that long haul by the durability and quality of Jesus Christ’s commitment and faithfulness to his Father, the same Christ who, in the words we just heard from the letter to the Hebrews, took his seat forever at the right hand of God.

Homily for the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, November 17, 2024.

Transition

Autumn weather, the welcome annual transition from summer to winter, at last seems to be (albeit belatedly) on its way. Meanwhile, in the political world, we in the United States have long been accustomed to another transition tradition at this season, as one "lame duck" President finishes out his term and prepares to transfer power to his recently elected successor.

For much of the Republic's history, the transition just happened, with greater or lesser degrees of amity and concord. With the 20th-century growth of the federal government, however, a more systematic transition became necessary. Federal law now requires requires the White House and agencies to begin transition planning well before a presidential election and the General Services Administration to provide office space and other core support services to presidents-elect and vice presidents-elect, as well as pre-election space and support to eligible candidates. Famously (or, rather, infamously) that didn't work so well four years ago. We will see how well it works this time.

The more visible - and somewhat ritualistic - aspects of the transition concern the direct, personal interactions of the principals, that is, the President and the President-elect. This usually entails at least one formal meeting of the two at the White House sometime after the election and then the formal, ceremonial meeting and ride together to the Capitol on Inauguration morning. Even that hasn't always gone so well. Witness four years ago when the outgoing President Trump boycotted his successor's inaugural. The last time that had happened was 1869, when President Andrew Johnson refused to attend President-elect Ulysses S Grant's inauguration. (Because of his health condition, in 1921 Woodrow Wilson did not attend Warren Harding's actual swearing-in, but he did do the traditional ride with him to the Capitol beforehand.)

It remains to be seen what January 20 will look like and how much of the traditional ritual will actually occur, but today at least President Biden is doing his part in welcoming President-elect Trump to confer with him at the White House. How well the outgoing and incoming staffs are collaborating may be another question, the answer to which we will learn soon enough.

The legal stipulations for transition-planning and inter-Administration cooperation reflect contemporary concerns about effectively staffing the federal government. What that federal government will actually look like once staffed by MAGA Trump cronies is something else again!

The personal and ceremonial aspects of the transition are more about constitutional and democratic symbolism - the sort of thing Americans used to take great pride in, although perhaps not so much anymore. At the first presidential transition I can really remember - from Eisenhower to Kennedy - one memorable line of commentary was, "Thus passes power, freely won, freely given." That, of course, is at the heart of constitutional, democratic governance. If not lost, that mindset has been irretrievably injured by President Trump's behavior in the 2020-2021 transition. While a return to the traditional rituals would in itself be welcome, much more important will be the long-term impact of our recent political crises on popular beliefs and attitudes about constitutional and democratic governance.

Veterans Day and Our Wider World

When I was in elementary school in the 1950s, November was for us a wonderful month full of school holidays. There were five of them  - All Saints Day (November 1), Election Day, Veterans Day (November 11), Thanksgiving Day, and the Friday after (at a time when most folks went back to work that day). Veterans Day is still a legal holiday (no mail, no banking), but otherwise gets little attention - unlike, say, in Canada, where the Remembrance Day two-minute silence still has real power. In a better world, perhaps, we would make more of Veterans Day. But that is not where we are.

That said, the Veterans Day we do have still has salience. Primarily, it evokes personal, familial, and local appreciations of those who have served our country in uniform, especially in our many wars. That is certainly edifying and important. At a more remote remove, however, Veterans Day has an historical component. It is, after all, the 106th anniversary of the Armistice that ended the First Word War, which (along with the war itself) paved the way not for a century of peace but a prolonged period of wars and civil and global conflicts. 

When the Armistice Day Centenary was celebrated in 1918, Donald Trump was the U.S. President, someone whose understanding of what World War I had been about and whose appreciation of military service and sacrifice were both severely attenuated at best. His presence at the commemorations created some dissonance at the time.

Now Donald Trump is to be President again, and his neo-isolationist outlook offers an alternative perspective to the traditional themes of this holiday.

The first widespread takeaway from the experience of World War I was that the pre-war order (Churchill's "Old World in its sunset" that was "glorious to look upon" ) had failed and could not be put back together again. The question then became what new international order could be created to replace what had self-destructed. The post-war world the winners created proved disastrous (which could and should have been predicted at the time). The gratuitous destruction of the Hapsburg Empire, the calumny of German war guilt, the imposition of reparations, plus the rise of the Soviet Union on Europe's eastern end, all created an international order set up for failure which it did within 20 years.

The victors of World War II won much more decisively, and that perhaps gave them greater freedom to restructure the international order in a way which appeared to them to be more promising. Even the Cold War, which was my first introduction to international relations, unintentionally created a kind of stability. And, while the end of the Cold War was a bountiful benefit for those living in the Soviet Union and in eastern Europe, it in turn created unexpected new problems and new disruptions.

We are now coming to the end of that post-Cold-War era, wondering what exactly is going to take its place. One thing that is clear is that unlike the previous two post-WWII eras, the U.S. will not play the kind of exceptional role it has hitherto played. 

And that is a very somber reflection for this Veterans Day.

Realignment

 

Matthew Sitman (co-host of the Know Your Enemy podcast) has argued that the story of this election is "the story of Western politics over the past fifty years: class dealignment and education polarization, which is to say the continued abandonment of center-left parties for the political right by working-class voters." 

It is hard to argue with that almost obvious assertion, which Sitman amplifies as follows: Trump "told people who to blame for the problems in their life, real or imagined, and promised to fix it all. ... Working class Americans didn’t turn out for Trump because he threatens democracy. They did so because our democracy, such as it is, didn’t seem worth defending. Any arguments about the way forward need to begin with this depressing reality."

Sitman may be expressing a more ideologically jaundiced feeling about American liberal democracy than the average contemporary Democrat would easily identify with, but what may be hard to identiy with may need to be at least considered. An important reality is that, while the Democrats are increasingly vulnerable on issues the majority of voters care about and are, therefore, diminishing, the Republicans have been building a growing, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, working-class, non-college-educated coalition. 

The fact is also that that coalition also includes tech billionaires and other super-rich who stand to benefit from Trump's policies, likely to the detriment of the "working-class" components of the coalition. It remains to be seen whether those components of the emerging Republican coalition will hold the party accountable for its failures or - more likely, based on recent history - whether they will remain loyal, contrary to their immediate economic interests, because of their cultural identity politics.

Cultural identity politics remain the Democrats' Achilles Heel. The infamous ad about Harris supposedly endorsing tax-payer-funded gender surgery for illegal immigrant prisoners may well have been the single most successful Republican ad, one which effectively symbolizes the wider cultural dissonance at the heart of so much of the Democratic party's present problems.

It is not that Democrats don't offer policies which would be beneficial for members of the new multi-racial, multi-ethnic, working-class, non-college-educated coalition. But voters can usually discern what matters most motivate and inspire a candidate. And at present that perception is that an array of counter-cultural (even counter common-sense) identity politics positions may be what most motivate and inspire many elite, college-educated Democrats.

Reckoning for Liberalism

Early this morning after the election, I went across town to a regularly scheduled medical appointment. At that early hour, the New York streets were full of people going to work or school. Everyone seemed to be doing what people probably would have been doing had there not been an election. It was a salutary reminder that life is about more than politics.

That said, today we need to talk about politics. The American people have overwhelmingly elected the most problematic presidential candidate in modern history, with potentially catastrophic consequences for many Americans, for immigrants, and for the world order we have known for decades. The severity of the challenge to democratic institutions and norms that the country will face in the next few months and years will be unprecedented. It will be a dark and difficult time for America. 

Meanwhile, we have just had an election, and it behooves us to analyze its meaning and import. Not only did Trump win in the Electoral College, but he appears also to have won the popular vote. If so, he would be the first Republican to do so in 20 years. He overwhelmingly improved over his past performance in much of the country (apparently getting the largest vote-share of any Republican since 1988). It was a genuinely stunning popular victory, which also confirms what an angry and divided country this is at present.

Undoubtedly, critics will now attack Kamala Harris' campaign. While I think more analysis is called for, my sense is that she ran about as good a campaign as she could. Perhaps, a different candidate might have done better, but I believe the basic lesson of the election is a strong popular rejection of contemporary liberalism and the liberal "establishment." Obviously, the cultural issues the Democrats thought might carry them to victory could not overcome the widespread dissatisfaction with the Biden Administration and especially with its handling of the economy and immigration. While it may be true that the U.S. economy is in fact the envy of the rest of the world, the Democrats' seeming insensitivity to how ordinary Americans actually experience the economy seems to have doomed their efforts to change the subject to cultural concerns.

Whether a different candidate could have done better than Harris is really also a question about Joe Biden's initial insistence on running for a second term. That became unsustainable after the June debate; but it is possible that, if he had announced at the end of 2022 that he would not run again, the subsequent primary process might have produced a better candidate (or even made Harris a better candidate). But it is really hard to see what more Harris could have done, given the strong headwinds she was facing.

There probably will be an argument about whether her "popular front" strategy made the most sense. She apparently premised her campaign on the belief that lots of centrist voters (including many anti-Trump Republicans) would support her. In the end, there do not seem to be many such centrists left! On the other hand, it would seem almost ludicrous to argue that an alternative, more leftist, "progressive" campaign strategy would have wooed many voters away from Trump. Whatever may be said for or against "progressive" politics, the reality is that "progressive" politics tends to read the culture wrong.

"Populism" is ultimately an electoral NO to continued rule by the elite governing political class, which the Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans represent right now. The election results undercut any moderate Republican argument for some sort of recidivist Reaganism. More importantly, however, the election was a great rebuke to contemporary post-cold-war liberalism and especially to its increasingly "woke" expressions, which appear increasingly irrelevant to ordinary people's lives and offensive to their moral values. How the Democrats sort this out in the inevitable internal party struggle that is ahead may determine what, if any, prospects for success the Democratic party may have in the near future.

The Greatest of All Plagues

 

Capitalism solved the problem of production, one of my professors used to say, but it's up to others to solve the problem of distribution. That "problem of distribution" is increasingly the problem of economic inequality, which is incredibly worse now than it was 50 years ago when I was studying political theory. As political scientist David Lay Williams reminds us in this latest - and very traditional - conversation within the history of political theory, whereas 'in 1965, the average CEO earned 21.1 times as much as a typical worker at the same company," by 2021,  the average CEO "earned 351.1 times as much as a typical worker at the same company."

The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought From Plato to Marx (Princeton U. Pr., 2024) is written in the format of a traditional history of political theory, treating the political philosophies of Plato, the NewTestament, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx. The book takes its title from Plato's Laws, 744d, where the Athenian Stranger characterizes civil war as the greatest of all plagues, which he describes as an inevitable outcome of economic inequality. Plato's Laws in fact famously restrict inequality to a 4:1 ratio.

Williams takes us through some of the traditional canon of political theory, focusing on theorists' (beginning with Plato) preoccupation with civic unity and harmony and the obstacles that inordinate accumulations of great wealth have long been recognized as posing for societies. "Perhasp the single most common theme uniting thinkers in this book regarding the problem of inequality is the degree to whcih inequality divides political communities."

His particular bete-noir is sufficientarianism, which is preoccupied with alleviating poverty rather than overcoming inequality. With Adam Smith, the traditional zero-sum view of the economy changed importantly with the new capitalist understanding of economic growth. One consequence of the reality of economic growth has been the sufficientarian preoccupation with poverty to the neglect of inequality. Yet, as Plato's 4:1 ratio reminds us, there are limits to how much inequality a society can appropriately tolerate. Sufficientariansim, according to Williams, "severely constrains the moral imagination as it has been expressed throughout history." It also ignores something well understood by the theorists analyzed in this book, namely "the corrupting effect of inequality on the rich themselves."

This well written retrieval of the tradition of the history of political thought offers a rich treatment of why and how economic inequality contributes to social disunity, political instability, and deep-seated personal and collective moral corruption.

Jaywalking in NYC

 

After 66 years, it is now legal again to jaywalk in New York City! I am (sigh) old enough to remember when crossing the street against the light became illegal in 1958. I remember the TV ads that said, "You now risk a Summons"! In fact, until the change in the law this year, jaywalking carried a fine of up to $250.

From what I have observed, jaywalking is almost universal in New York and in many other places as well. (I remember how shocked I was when I moved to Milwaukee in 1977 to discover that the law against jaywalking was actually enforced there.) It seems to be natural human rebellion against the automobile's claim to own the streets.

The weird term "jaywalking" apparently originated in the early 1900s, transferring to pedestrians who crossed the street contrary to traffic laws an expression "jay-driver" already in use for someone who drove on the wrong side of the road. (The term "jay" at that time apparently had the connotation of someone who didn't know how to behave in a city.) Applied to pedestrians, it validated the 20th-century mistake that the streets - and, therefore, cities - belong to cars, not people.

Of course, caution in crossing the street is always advisable. According to the NYC Department of Transportation, 200 people have died in the last five years while crossing the street against traffic signals. On the other hand, everyone recognizes that it is often quite safe to cross against the light or outside the cross walk. It all depends on the presence or absence of actual traffic.

The often overly congested character of New York City traffic adds to jaywalking's appeal. When traffic seems stuck and barely moving and horns are blowing (more as an expression of frustration and impatience rather than as a practical measure), it is natural to take the opportunity to cross wherever one can. It is part of the dynamic created by congestion that valorizes assertion and pushing ahead wherever possible.

Look both ways - and keep looking - is the only safe way to cross, whether with the light or even now against it.

Dilexit Nos

 

On October 24, Pope Francis issued an Encyclical Letter Dilexit Nos ("On the Human and Divine Love of the Heart of Jesus Christ"). This was the first encyclical devoted entirely to the Sacred Heart since Pius XII's encyclical Haurietis Aquas, published on May 15, 1956, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus by Pope Pius IX. Given the special relationships between Jesuits and the modern devotion to the Sacred Heart.

Like so many such documents, Dilexit Nos is longer than it needs to be and unlikely to attract casual readers. That said, there are a few points it would be particularly desirable to mention. Francis highlights how what we contemplate and adore in this devotion "is the whole Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, represented by an image that accentuates his heart. That heart of flesh is seen as the privileged sign of the inmost being of the incarnate Son and. his love, the heart of Jesus is 'the natural sign and symbol of his boundless love" (48). The Pope stresses the significance of the image of the heart. "Universal human experience has made the image of the heart something unique" (53). "The venerable image portraying Christ holding out jis loving heart also shows him looking directly at us, inviting us to encounter, dialogue and trust; it shows his strong hands capable of supporting us and his lips that speak personally to each of us" (54).

Devotion to the Sacred Heart highlights the humanity of Christ. "The Fathers of the Church, opposing those who denied or downplayed the true humanity of Christ, insisted on the concrete and tangible reality of the Lord's human affections" (62). "Devotion to Christ's heart is essential for our Christian life to the extent that it expresses our openness in faith and adoration to the mystery of the Lord's divine and human love" (83).

Francis recalls the historical importance of this devotion in the battle against Jansenists, who "looked askance on all that was human, affective and corporeal, and so viewed this devotion as distancing us from pure worship of the Most High God" (86). Moving to today, "we are also seeing a proliferation of varied forms of religiosity that have nothing to do with a personal relationship with the God of love, but are new manifestations of a disembodied spirituality" (87). Francis also adds "that the heart of Christ also frees us from another kind of dualism found in communities and pastors excessively caught up in external activities, structural reforms that have little to do with the Gospel, obsessive reorganization plans, worldly projects, secular ways of thinking and mandatory programmes" (88).

Regarding the history of the devotion, "the Church today rejects nothing of the good that the Holy Spirit has bestowed on us down the centuries, for she knows that it will always be possible to discern a clearer and deeper meaning in certain aspects of that devotion, and to gain new insights over the course of time" (109). Unsurprisingly, the Pope highlights the devotion's resonances within the Society of Jesus. He quotes Pedro Arupe: "From my novitiate on, I have always been convinced that what we call devotion to the Sacred Heart contains a symbolic expression of what is most profound in Ignatian spirituality, and of an extraordinary efficacy - ultra quam speraverint - both for its own perfection and for apostolic fruitfulness" (146).

Finally, the Pope addresses what he calls "the missionary dimension." Accordingly, "our work as Christians for the betterment of society should not obscure it religious inspiration, for that, in the end, would be to seek less for our brothers and sisters than what God desires to give them" (205).

Francis concludes: "Christ's love can give a heart to our world and revive love wherever we think that the ability to love has been definitively lost" (218).

November

In November, in the days to remember the dead
When air smells cold as earth,
St. Malachy, who is very old, gets up,
Parts the thin curtain of trees and dawns upon our land.

So begins a famous poem by the 20th-century American monk Thomas Merton. (Saint Malachy was a 12th-century Cistercian who became Bishop of Saint Patrick's See of Armagh, whose feast is customarily kept of November 3, the day after All Souls Day.)

Once upon a time, November 1 marked the beginning of the old European/Celtic winter. Even if, sadly, the weather isn't quite so cold as it used to be at this point in the year (thanks to the self-inflicted damage of climate change), the November Triduum of Halloween, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day does bring with it an inescapable shift in mood, traditionally reflected in the change of seasons. (In Tennessee last weekend, I did get to see fantastic fall foliage, another seasonal sign that sometimes seems increasingly muted.)

These annual days to remember the dead keep us connected with those who have gone before us, whose number, of course, keeps increasing as we age and come closer to joining them. It is more than merely a matter of nostalgia. Remembering is a fundamentally human activity, all the more to be treasured as we age. Remembering those whose lives once intersected with ours affirms that their lives were real and genuinely mattered. Factor in the faith dimension of the Communion of Saints, which All Saints and All Souls Days are intended to focus on, our remembering those who have gone before us marked with the sign of faith celebrates our shared destiny and shared hope.  

Photo: November Memorials to the Departed, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY.

Conclave (The Movie)

Almost eight years ago (January 29, 2017), I posted a review of Conclave, a book by British novelist Robert Harris, noted for his fictionalized accounts of power and its corruptions. That novel is now a movie. Thanks largely to its impressive cast and beautiful filming, Conclave (the movie) is getting lots of well deserved attention and pre-Oscar speculation. The cast includes Ralph Fiennes as Cardinal Lawrence, Dean of the Sacred College and thus the one tasked to manage the Conclave, through whom we experience most of the tension in the film, Stanley Tucci as Cardinal Bellini, Lawrence's friend and leader of the "progressive" faction, Sergio Castellito as Cardinal Tedesco, the leader of the "conservative" faction, Lucian Msamati as Cardinal Adeyemi, the African papabile (until he isn't anymore), John LIthgow as Cardinal Tremblay, another particularly ambitious and problematic contender, Carlos Diehz as Cardinal Benitez, the mystery cardinal, and Isabella Rossellini as Sister Agnes, who is in charge of the domestic arrangements for the Conclave.

To reprise some of what I said about the book that applies also to the film, the conflicts and divisions among the cardinals are what we might expect. They present a plausible portrayal of current conflicts and divisions in the contemporary Church, filtered here through the personal ambitions and rivalries of different cardinals participating in the conclave. The unexpected arrival of a hitherto unknown cardinal (named by the deceased pope in pectore) predictably at first gives the novel a kind of vaguely Shoes of the Fisherman feel, which creates a certain expectation of how it will end, an expectation that persists, despite all the twists and turns and personal ups and downs of the plot  And, as different papabili rise and fall in the balloting and are eventually eliminated by a cleverly constructed series of personal scandals and various political machinations that punctuate the otherwise routine sequence of (beautifully portrayed) ritual ballots, the film does indeed seem to set us up for a predictable outcome. Then comes a shocking and radically challenging finale which no one, no matter how attentive to contemporary ecclesiastical conflicts, would likely have expected (and which I will not reveal lest I spoil the film for anyone).

Having read the book, I knew the surprise ending already, but from the multiple gasps of surprise I heard in the crowded theater I must assume that most of those in the theater with me last week had not read the book beforehand! In any case, so unexpected is the ending (even more so in the movie than in the book, which at least contained mild hints) that I almost think of it as two separate stories. The first is a well-crafted, entertaining, and at times insightful, if conventionally ideological and propagandistic account of the conflicts and divisions in the Church and hence the explosive mix of spirituality, religion, ideology, and personal and national ambitions, with might be expected to characterize a contemporary conclave. The second suggests a scenario so implausible and so spiritually and religiously problematic that it completely overshadows and detracts from the more relevantly realistic first story, submerging it in an outrageous moral ambiguity that far exceeds the moral ambiguities that characterized the first story. 

That said, the movie is beautifully filmed and exceptionally well acted, well worth seeing, whatever one thinks of its finale.

The Paradox of Powerlessness

I don’t know about you, but there are times when I really wish the Gospels included more information about Jesus’ disciples.  For example, wouldn’t it be interesting to be able to listen in on the disciples’ conversation en route to Capernaum? I can picture Peter, perhaps still stung by Jesus’ rebuke in last week’s Gospel, reminding the others that he was still in line for the top job! I can almost hear Andrew answer, “OK, brother, but don’t forget that I met him first, and I introduced you to him!” And John chiming in, “but I’m the one he’s closest to!” And, of course, Judas, “I’m the one he trusts with the money, without me where would you all be!”

Instead, the Gospel today [Mark 9:30-37] tells us that when Jesus asked what they had been arguing about, they were suddenly (and suspiciously) tongue-tied, and that Jesus, ever the teacher, took the opportunity to teach them a lesson.

Actually, this was the second time Jesus had tried to teach them what lay ahead. But they failed to understand.  In a world without power-point presentations and other such gimmicks, Jesus employed a child as his instructional aide.

Children induce all sorts of reactions in people. A baby is a sure attention-grabber in any gathering. Generally in our society, children are considered cute, innocent individuals, to whom we are expected to react positively and benevolently. 

But what is distinctive about childhood – and certainly what Jesus’ audience would have responded to – is not cuteness or innocence but rather the dependence and hence powerlessness, that go with being a child. Even rich children, as long as they remain children, are dependent on someone else to exercise power on their behalf. 

So, when Jesus wanted to teach his disciples what following him is all about, he pointed to a powerless child. In this way, he sought to teach his clueless disciples the paradox of the powerless Christ, who, in obedience to his Father, assumed our ordinariness as his own to meet us, in his economic and political poverty, where we are all at our most powerless – in the darkness of death, where all our obsessive human preoccupation with power and status, our aspiration to greatness and accomplishment, all come to nothing.

No wonder they found him hard to understand! It seems being a disciple means more than merely listening to Jesus’ words and possibly preaching them to others. No, it means being led, by him and with him, where he was led. It means leaving behind our perpetual preoccupation with power, wealth, and status, our aspiration to greatness and accomplishment, our competitiveness with one another and within our own selves - the passions that the Epistle of James [James 3:16-4:3] so strongly warns us about, causing us to covet but not possess, to envy but not obtain, to ask but not receive. From high school popularity contests to their imitations in our national political campaigns, it’s all about who’s up and who’s down, who’s in and who’s out.

   

In contrast, Jesus challenges us to come to know Christ with the powerless. He invites us to compensate for our own limited moral experience by paying attention – difficult as that may be - to the experiences of others, others whose lived reality of poverty or other forms of powerlessness (homeless people, for example, maligned and defamed immigrants, for another) can cut through our comfortable self-understanding and teach us something new, expose us to realities and insights we would not otherwise be exposed to.

Good teacher that he was, Jesus did not totally denigrate the ambition of his disciples. Instead, he gave them a new definition of greatness to aspire to. “If anyone wishes to be first, he shall be the last of all and the servant of all.” 

That can be quite frightening, even threatening. Certainly, it scared the disciples. And it scares most of us most of the time, which is why we tend to pass over it as quickly as possible in search of some more “upbeat,” ostensibly friendly message, as if the point of Jesus’ life were to affirm us and our way of life. 

But this ultimately this is the challenge of a becoming a disciple – for all Christians from first to last.

 

Homily for the 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time, September 22, 2024, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, New York.

Cats and Dogs

It is a challenge to keep up with all the lies Donald Trump and his sidekick J.D. Vance have been promoting. Some of them especially stand out - both for their absurdity and for their potential for danger to real innocent people. One such is the bizarre claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH, are eating people's pets. On its face, of course, the claim is absurd, almost comic - except for the fact that it is so dangerous. It is, in a sense, a contemporary American version of the classic anti-semitic "Blood Libel." 

The so-called "Blood Libel" was an antisemitic canard, which falsely accused Jews of murdering Christians (typically Christian children) in order to use their blood in the supposed performance of certain religious rituals. In modern America, where pets are often treated as children, the lie that Haitian immigrants, who are here in the U.S. completely legally and have settled in Springfield because there were jobs there, have been stealing and eating people's pets, performs an analogously perverse and dangerous function of dehumanizing and "othering" a group of people, whose only actual distinction is being originally from a different country.

The immediately primary problem associated with such lies is the danger its victims may find themselves in, as a result of inflamed public opinion at the most fanatic extremes. Obviously the safety of innocent Haitian immigrants in Springfield needs to be prioritized. Above and beyond all that, however, there is the broader and longer term problem of the complete coarsening of our culture. We have become a nation of enemies to one another, motivated more by hatred and grievance than anything else. Whatever else happens, however this election ends, we will long be struggling as a nation with the damage we have done to ourselves as a viable human community.

The Politics of Joy

 

The Democratic National Convention is over and done. Accepting her party's nomination, Kamala Harris hit a grand slam. It could hardly have been better. Or a greater celebration of American democracy at its glorious best.

Nor could there have been a greater contrast with the sorry spectacle a month ago in Milwaukee.

Who would have known a month or more ago that this was how it would be? Who would have known that, unburdened of what has been, the party would have been so united, so confident, so committed, so ready to fight the fight against MAGA darkness?

Kamala Harris and the Democrats in general had several obvious tasks - to introduce Kamala uniting her story with our American story, to explain and call out Trump's challenge to American freedom, national security, and international alliances, and to offer a vision of the future that is hopeful, patriotic, and strong in contrast to the other party's dark depressing weak and unpatriotic vision of American carnage. Not just Kamala's speech but the whole convention met the challenge to frame this campaign.

Unlike the personality cult convention in Milwaukee, the Democrats featured their former presidents and former candidates and their rising stars - AOC, Peter Buttigieg, Gretchen Whitmer, Hakeem Jeffries, and more.

But now comes the hard part, the campaign: Kamal for the People vs. Trump for himself, the party that loves and celebrates America vs. the party that denigrates America. That's a good frame for the campaign. But so divided and polarized is our country right now, thanks to nine years of MAGA darkness, this will be a very close election in which every vote counts, every voter counts.

Back To Chicago

Riding home from physical therapy on the crosstown bus the other day, I found myself humming Simon and Garfunkel's 1960s classic Sound of Silence - a great song, well worth humming anytime! Yet I had to wonder whether, somewhere in the recesses of my consciousness, the "Back to 1968" vibe increasingly associated with this week's Democratic convention may have had something to do with my humming that song so thoroughly associated with nostalgia for that tumultuous era.

As almost everyone who cares already knows, the Democrats are returning to Chicago for their convention this week. For all the reminders of and comparisons with 1968, the spell was actually already broken in 1996, the last time the Democrats convened in Chicago, the city which has actually hosted 26 national conventions, of which 1968 was something of an outlier, far from typical. That said, there are some noteworthy parallels between 1968 and 2024. Now as then, the sitting President has stepped aside in favor of the sitting Vice President, who has achieved the nomination without putting the country through the distortions caused by the now-routine primary process. Indeed, it was the unhappy 1968 experience which largely led to the institutionalization of the present primary process. Our accidental liberation from that ordeal this year could conceivably kindle a greater appreciation for the traditional convention system. although I suppose that's really just the political scientist in me talking! 

Of course, it would be a great thing to revitalize our diminished political parties, to increase the role of elected officials in choosing the party's nominee and diminish the role of ideological extremes and the power of money in choosing the party's nominee. We have just had a taste of how well that can work. But, again, that's probably just the political scientist in me talking! There is, sadly, little chance of it happening in reality!

Unlike 1968, however, the Democrats descend upon Chicago as a very unified party which is, as they say, in it to win it. Undoubtedly, there will be pro-Hamas protesters, making much more noise than their real numbers would warrant. The nominee has already answered them at a recent rally in Detroit, when she said "I'm speaking now." However obnoxious or embarrassing such protests may prove, they will be nothing like the protests that characterized the 1968 convention, which (while probably also representing less than a majority in the party and the country) really did represent a sizable minority, both in the party and in the country. Whatever their other divisions, Democrats today are largely united in their effort to save the country from anti-democratic authoritarianism and end the Trump threat. That represents a world of difference from the disastrously fractured party of 1968.

Tonight, President Biden gets to speak. I believe it was Harry Truman who was the first sitting president not seeking re-election to speak at his party's convention. That was in 1952. Then Eisenhower did it in 1960, Reagan in 1988,  Clinton in 2000, Obama in 2016. (Notably, LBJ did not attend, let alone address, the Democratic convention in 1968.) It is only right and proper to honor Biden tonight, to honor his long career of public service, to honor his historic accomplishment in ousting Trump in 2020, and to honor his legacy of presidential accomplishment, the most consequential presidency probably since LBJ's.

And then it will be time to turn the page and look to the future. Nostalgia has limited purchase in politics, particularly right now when the degree of disillusionment with politics-as-usual has reached such significant heights. The choice this year is between the particularly dystopian future symbolized by Project 2025 and an as yet incompletely articulated more hopeful future, which it will be the convention's task this week to present to the American people.

Weird, Weirder, Weirdest

There are lots of great things to say about Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and why he will likely make a phenomenal running mate for Kamala Harris. In addition to all of that, however, he has the added distinction of apparently having popularized the weird meme as an all-purpose descriptor for the strange, dangerous, and wildly out-of-the-mainstream views being propounded particularly by his now opponent, GOP candidate JD Vance.

Vance is not the only candidate for the weirdness accolade, of course. For pure, unadulterated weirdness, there is, for example, the strange episode of RFK, Jr., and the bear cub, which has only recently come to light a decade after it all happened. Bobby and the Bear may well be the single weirdest candidate story this election year. But RFK, Jr.'s star-crossed campaign has never really been anything other than weird.

Vance, on the other hand, having journeyed from anti-Trump elite literary darling to total subservience to his party's Dear Leader and a voice for increasingly weird ultra-MAGA on-line malevolence, is a far more interestingly tragic case - as well as potentially more threatening to traditional constitutional and democratic governance. And, while Trump in many ways represents a somewhat post-religious extremism, Vance highlights the increasing significance of pseudo-religious anti-constitutional, anti-democratic extremism.

Which is not to say, of course, that problems like the contemporary obstacles to family formation are not important issues, worthy of serious attention. Rather, their invocation by weirdly out-of-the-mainstream integralist and integralist-adjacent ideologies and sheer personal malevolence just further forecloses the kind of rational deliberation and democratic debate such issues deserve.