Saturday, February 8, 2025

Beyond "Ordo Amoris"

 

When trying to understand the apparently empathy-challenged Trump presidency, I am reminded of Dr. Seuss's famous description of the Grinch in his 1957 children's book, How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

The Grinch hated Christmas! The whole Christmas season!
Now, please don’t ask why. No one quite knows the reason.
It could be his head wasn’t screwed on just right.
It could be, perhaps his shoes were too tight.
But I think that the most likely reason of all
May have been that his heart was two sizes too small.

The Grinch, of course, was a fictional character. but there is nothing fictional about the Trump presidency, nor about its increasingly pernicious effects on American society and its increasingly corrosive effects on American religion. 

Consider, for example, the recent argument about Vice President J.D. Vance about order amoris ("rightly ordered love"), which began as a twitter debate between Vance and British Tory politician/podcaster/public Christian intellectual Rory Stewart.

The 2024 election was, for all the talk about the price of eggs, also very much a culture-war election, and this seemingly arcane religious debate actually goes to the heart of that cultural conflict, which has to do with our capacity to care for one another - or, to use Dr. Seuss's imagery, the size of our hearts.

The ordo amoris argument arose when Vance claimed that Christians have a hierarchy of moral obligations, with their special moral relationships with their family and their communities exercising a certain priority. In response, Rory Stewart highlighted John 15:12, where Jesus says that the greatest love entails laying down one’s life for others. He also emphasized Jesus' apparent ambivalence about family connections and suggested that the Christian tradition has been detrimentally over-influenced in this area by classical pagan philosophy.

Of course, there is a sense in which what both are saying is partly true.

In the natural order, which includes the family and the political community (about which classical pagan philosophy has had a lot to say), we have obvious natural obligations to those with whom we are specially connected. The Kingdom of God does not extricate us from those natural relationships, and in some cases actually affirms the obligations they entail. Examples include the fourth commandment, "Honor thy father and they mother" (Exodus 20:12), "Let every person be subject to the governing authorities" (Roman 13:1), "So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all, and especially to those who are of the household of faith" (Galatians 6:10). 

It is likewise obvious that, while scripture and tradition reaffirm our natural obligations and connections, they clearly command us - not as citizens, but as disciples - to strive to go beyond them. Hence, Saint Paul: "I still live my human life, but it is a life of faith in the son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me" (Galatians 2:20). Discipleship does not abolish family and civic ties, but it does definitely relativize them. Jesus famously did this when he asked, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” (Matthew 12:48). And, of course, there is the expansive judgment scene in Matthew: "Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me." (Matthew 25:40).

This is an old argument, which goes back to the debate between Jesus and the lawyer that led to the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). Pointedly, Jesus did not actually answer the lawyer's question, "Who is my neighbor?," a question which reflects the natural order of things by seeking to set limits and boundaries to our obligations to one another. Instead Jesus answered in the order of grace by exemplifying instead what it means to behave as a neighbor towards others, illustrating how such localized limits are transcended.

Again, Vance is correct in suggesting that, as family members and citizens, we do have special moral obligations to fellow family members and fellow citizens. It is with these obligations that civil society and its laws are primarily concerned. Thus, as Vice President, Vance has specifically sworn an oath to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic."

But Stewart is also - and maybe more importantly - correct in that, as disciples, we must never remain satisfied with those limited natural obligations and must constantly expand the borders of our moral community to include others outside those limits as well. This is primarily a religious rather than a civil obligation, but inasmuch as the natural order is inherently ordered to grace, those who recognize that they live in the order of grace must act accordingly. Examples of religiously motivated efforts to act within the political order to care beyond the boundaries of family and civil community can take many forms, including government-funded programs, e.g., George W. Bush's (now possibly endangered) PEPFAR, which has provided funding for HIV/AIDS treatment, prevention, and research and has been the largest global health program focused on a single disease in history prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

As limited human beings, with limited resources, our ability to keep expanding the borders of the moral community of those we care about will also always be limited, quite apart from the consequences of sin which will always further limit our actual desire and willingness to do so. Like the Grinch, our natural hearts may always be two sizes too small, even in many instances at the level of family and nation, let alone as disciples of Jesus and citizens of his kingdom. The lifelong challenge of discipleship and allegiance to Christ's kingdom is to allow our hearts constantly to be expanded by God's grace - even as the Grinch's heart tripled in size thanks to his experience of Christmas.




Thursday, February 6, 2025

The Brutalist (The Movie)

 


Because of its extreme length (3 hours, 35 minutes), I hesitated at first to see The Brutalist (nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture), but I was eventually persuaded - by the presence of a 15-minute intermission - to allot the time and give the film a chance. Watching it is still a challenge on multiple levels, but definitely worth the time and the effort. The film seldom drags the way some other long movies do, but the Intermission is a true blessing, which makes it easier to appreciate the film in all its sumptuous scope.

The film depicts a previously successful Bauhaus-trained Hungarian architect, László Tóth (brilliantly portrayed by actor Adrian Brody), who immigrates to the U.S. as a Displaced Person after his having survived the Holocaust in World War II Europe. Even under better circumstances, immigration is inevitably an experience of loss and opportunity. Tóth experiences both. One gets a vivid sense of the once-successful architect's stressful sense of loss - of menial jobs, soup kitchens, and even drug addiction - as he struggles in a new society where he can always sense that, as a Jew and a foreigner, he may be unwanted, even if America does also offer amazing opportunities. (These opportunities are exemplified in the first part of the film by his assimilated cousin, Attila, with whom he first finds temporary, if stressful, shelter.) There is also the not unrelated subplot of the toll the experience takes on all of Tóth's relationships - especially with his immediate and extended families.

By chance, Tóth gets to remodel an old library in a rich patron's palatial residence. At first his patron is unimpressed, and Tóth is impoverished again. But then the rich man realizes the value of his new library, because pictures of it have been published in a magazine, and he learns more about his architect's fame. One wonders why these considerations should have so changed the rich man's judgment, why they made the architect's product suddenly more beautiful - or perhaps just more commercially valuable.

The film's title and the preeminence of architecture in the story inevitably invites comparisons with the "brutalist" architectural style, which disfigured so many buildings (including, alas, even churches) in the 20th century. One can, of course, see in such "brutalism" a metaphor for the ugliness and brutality of so much of modern life - a brutality which the movie dramatically depicts in human terms in the course of Tóth's own life, both in the war in Europe and the Holocaust, and (within the film itself) in Tóth's up-and-down life in the U.S. He eventually does get to continue his self-expressive artistic path, but he must do so within the constraints of modern capitalism and commerce, which he finds increasingly challenging, and which take their toll on him personally as well as on his family and few friends.

While relatively understated dramatically, the (initially secret but eventually exposed) rape scene seems to symbolize so much of the tension at the heart of the story, and particularly the cruelty and corruption embedded in capitalist commercial culture, in spite of all its real opportunities and potential benefits.

It is a very long film with many intersecting themes. Among them is the post-Holocaust restoration of Jewish nationhood in the creation of the state of Israel (which, as it turns out, is the principal place in the world where the Bauhaus architecture in which Tóth trained in pre-war Germany has continued most strongly). Tóth's niece and her husband choose to join the Jewish immigration to Israel, while he and his wife continue to make their up-and-down way in the U.S. This may reflect a real debate that occurred in certain circles between the two primary post-war Jewish destinations, the presumably easier U.S. and the more difficult, challenging new state of Israel. The film leaves open whether in Tóth's case the U.S. really was easier, or whether Israel. might have been a more fulfilling option.






Tuesday, February 4, 2025

Yalta + 80

 

The most famous of the several Allied World War II summit conferences began 80 years ago today, February 4, 1945, at Yalta in Soviet Crimea.  Stalin, the great winner in the European war, insisted on his Allies' coming to him. Hence, the terminally ill President Roosevelt's 14,000 mile trip to Soviet Crimea, to which he referred in his last speech to Congress, which was also his only acknowledgment of his disability in public.

Especially during the Cold War, the legacy of the week-long Yalta Conference was much debated. It seems to me that two things can be true at the same time. On the one hand, President Roosevelt seemed to have a higher than was warranted view of his own ability to charm Stalin. His aide Harry Hopkins seemed to be much more trusting of the Soviets than seemed warranted. And both would have done better to have taken Churchill's worries about Soviet expansionism more seriously. Certainly Stalin, both before and after Yalta, exploited these weaknesses in his Allies. At the same time, however, it remains true that the Western Allies depended for much of the war on the Russians to hold off the Germans in the East and only opened a second front in the West in 1944. The Soviet Union lost some 27 million dead during the war against Germany, compared to the much more modest Allied death toll. Everyone at Yalta had to be aware of that disparity and equally aware of the Soviet determination to guarantee its future security in eastern Europe, as a buffer against any future German invasion. And, of course, everyone also knew that that Soviets now occupied the countries they had liberated from the Germans - including eventually part of Germany itself. Add to that the nearly universal expectation that the U.S. would again abandon Europe in two years, which only added to Churchill's wariness, and the Allied desire to get Soviet support in the still continuing war against Japan, which turned out to be unnecessary in the end but which no one foresaw at the time. All of that makes it difficult to imagine an outcome all that different from what emerged at the end of the Yalta conference.

That said, the resulting division of Europe proved disastrous, an outcome famously described by Churchill a year later as an "Iron Curtain." (I remember as a child hearing that phrase on the nightly radio news and wondering what an "Iron Curtain" might look like.) After ostensibly opposing the Cold War's division of Europe for decades, while largely accepting it in practice, the West finally legitimized it in the Helsinki Agreement (the "Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe") in 1975, which ironically and completely unexpectedly in turn set in motion the Human Rights movement that contributed eventually to to undoing of Soviet dominance in eastern Europe and of Communism itself in the Soviet Union.

Against all odds, Churchill hoped for a restored European balance of power. Hence his support for a re-empowered France and a genuinely independent Poland. He got the former, but, although the UK had gone to war in 1939 ostensibly to guarantee Poland's territorial integrity, he lost the latter. It is debatable whether, if FDR had been more willing to be more confrontational with Stalin (had he not still wanted to gain favor with Stalin to get his support for the United Nations and his assistance in the Pacific War), whether that might have made a difference. The fact remains that the Soviets were already in control of Poland militarily. While General George Patton did propose that the Allies finish the job, so to speak, by going to war against the Soviets in eastern Europe, neither the U.S. nor its Allies were realistically ready for or politically disposed to undertake such a military adventure in 1945, which is what it would have taken to dislodge the Soviets from Poland. In fact, Stalin only pushed his advantage up to a point. He honored his earlier agreement with Churchill about Greece and did not try to advance further west in Norway or Denmark. But where it mattered most (the buffer states between Germany and Russia) and where he already had the military upper hand, Stalin pressed his advantage, and there was little the western Allies could have done to alter Stalin's strategy.

Those old debates are now the stuff of history, but they defined the politics of the post-war world, and can still teach us some important lessons. What, for example, would a realistic Ukrainian settlement look like? Like Stalin in post-war Europe, Putin seems unlikely to be dislodged from either Crimea or eastern Ukraine. That may be lamentable, but it seems inescapable. The unforgettable lesson of Yalta remains one of the oldest lessons of international politics - that the correlation of forces on the ground remains one of the primary (if not always the primary) factor to be considered in any negotiation. 

In the end, Yalta paved the path for a military stalemate in Europe, with the continent (and the symbolic city of Berlin) left divided between east and west, with both sides tacitly accepting the division and unwilling to push each other too far. Perhaps that is what we can best hope for in international politics, and we must then count ourselves fortunate to have been born on the western side of that division.



Sunday, February 2, 2025

A Light in the Dark

 

The familiar carol stops at day 12 but today is in fact the 40th day of Christmas. It marks the definitive completion of the Christmas season. Especially in Catholic countries, the nativity scene typically remains in place in church until today. Thus, in January 2012, when I was studying saint-making in Rome, I had almost a full month to visit the various presepe – some monumentally elaborate, some surprisingly simple – on display in Rome’s many churches. 

 

In the western, Latin Church, today is currently called the Presentation of the Lord, but for several centuries it was also known as the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary. According to the Gospel we just heard, Mary and Joseph took the infant Jesus to Jerusalem according to the law of Moses, in order to observe two important religious obligations. The first was the ordinary obligation to be purified after childbirth. This reflected ancient beliefs about the sacredness of blood, and the requirement of ritual purification after any direct contact with blood. The second obligation concerned the special status and religious responsibilities of a first-born son (because of God’s having spared Israel’s first-born at the time of the Exodus). Jesus, Mary, and Joseph’s participation in these rituals highlights for us, first, the inviolable sacredness and dignity of all human lives, and, secondly, the special status (and corresponding responsibilities) which now define our entire lives, because of our relationship with Jesus.

 

Whatever the official title, however, the most common popular title for today’s celebration in the West has consistently been Candlemas Day, because of the Blessing of Candles and the Procession - originally in Rome an early morning, pre-dawn procession, originally somewhat penitential in character – with which today’s Mass begins. This replaced a pagan Roman custom, in which the Romans honored Februa, the mother of Mars the god of war, by lighting the city with candles and torches throughout the night. of that day. In the 7th century, Pope Sergius decreed that the faithful should instead honor the Christ and his mother on this day by lighting up the whole world with lamps and candles.

 

The name Candlemas calls attention, obviously, to the blessed candles, but also to their light – and to Jesus the One whom that light symbolizes. In the Gospel, the aged Simeon prays, “Now, Master, you may let your servant go in peace” and calls Christ “a light to reveal you to the nations.” In the Roman Rite, this prayer, known as the Nunc Dimittis, is recited daily at Night Prayer (Compline).

 

A secular version of Candlemas is “Groundhog Day.” Not so long ago, everyone in the western world knew about Candlemas Day. Today many may have forgotten Candlemas completely. Yet even those who may never even have heard of Candlemas can recognize the folklore that connects the day with the change of seasons. While the temperature is still decidedly wintry, the days are getting noticeably longer. Whereas Christmas comes at the mid-point of the winter’s darkness, with the year’s shortest day and its correspondingly longest night, Candlemas comes at the mid-point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, the transition (according to one ancient way of calculating the seasons) from winter to spring. Soon, day and night, light and dark will be equal. Thus, this last of the great winter light festivals invites us to look ahead to what these ancient seasonal feasts are meant to symbolize.

 

Today we recall with joy the Lord’s entry into his Temple: and suddenly (so says the prophet Malachi) there will come to the temple the Lord whom you seek. At the same time, we hear, in wise old Simeon’s words to Mary, the first reference to what lies ahead, the first reference to the cross. Behold, this child is destined … to be a sign that will be contradicted – and you yourself a sword will pierce – so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.


So, even as we take one last look back at winter and Christmas, Candlemas looks ahead to spring and Lent and reminds us that the point of Christmas is Easter, as Simeon and Anna’s encounter with the infant Jesus in the Jerusalem Temple points us toward our own encounter with the Risen Christ here and now.

 

Since 1997, Candlemas has also been observed as the World Day of Consecrated Life. Just as on this day candles are blessed symbolizing Christ who is the light of the world, so too religious priests, brothers, and sisters in the various Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life are called to reflect the light of Jesus Christ to all peoples. It is obviously an especially appropriate day to pray that God will continue to bless his Church with abundant vocations to these communities so critical to the life of the Church. 

 

For me at this stage in my life, there is a joining of images and themes. Spending their lives in the Temple, Simeon and Anna seem to me to signify religious life in an obvious way. But they are also - and very pointedly - presented as old, about to retire from their earthly service to God.  Obviously, while their age makes them representative figures for Israel's long wait for the Lord, at the same time they easily elide into representatives of so many religious priests, brothers, and sisters (among whom I must include myself) who are also old, who have spent so much of our lives in the Temple, and are now preparing to pray our own final Nunc Dimittis.

 

This feast which seems to have so many names is also known, In the Eastern, non-Latin Churches, as the Encounter, the Feast of Meeting. Today, Christ comes to meet us, and we in turn get to meet him. Every Christmas we encounter Christ in a special way in the image the infant Jesus in the manger. When we encounter the infant Jesus in the nativity scene in church and at home, we appreciate anew the great mystery of the incarnation of God’s Son. When Simeon and Anna experienced in the infant Jesus the human face of God, they spoke about the child to all who were awaiting the redemption of Jerusalem. They hastened to proclaim and share their good news. That remains our task today – to take the light of these candles out into our spiritually still so very dark world, and so to share with all the light reflected in our own lives from the brightness of the human face of God

 

Homily for the feast of the Presentation of the Lord (Candlemas Day), Saint Paul the Apostle Church, February 2, 2025.

 

Tuesday, January 28, 2025

The Problematic of Presidential Leadership

 


The accession of a new presidential regime in Washington sent me back to a monumental late-20th century study of contrasting types of presidential leadership, Stephen Skowronek,The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to George Bush (Harvard U. Pr., 1993, 1997). 

Skowronek divided presidential history into four periods: (1) Patrician politics (1789-1832), when presidents purported to stand above faction and governed on the strength of their personal standing among elite notables; (2) Partisan politics (1832-1900), when political parties dominated and leadership utilized political patronage; (3) Pluralist politics (1900-1972), characterized by the rise of bureaucracy and bargaining among competing interests; and, finally, (4) Plebiscitary politics (1972- ), characterized by candidate-centered campaigns and a more direct relationship with the wider public, which generally prioritizes a growing economy.

More distinctively, he typed presidents in terms of a politics of reconstruction, presidents who repudiated the recent past (e.g., Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, FDR), a politics of articulation, presidents who continue previous tradition ( e.g., Monroe, Polk, Theodore Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson), and a politics of disjunction, presidents who continue previous tradition, when that tradition is becoming inadequate to the time and politically insupportable (e.g., John Quincy Adams, Pierce, Hoover, Carter). He also discussed in somewhat less detail a politics of preemption, presidents whose repudiative authority is more limited that that of reconstructive presidents, with consequent difficulties (e.g., Tyler, Andrew Johnson, Wilson, and Nixon). He also alluded to three other more unique cases, Coolidge, Eisenhower, and Cleveland.

Skowronek's analysis is quite dense and presents an immense amount of historical detail to buttress its distinctive treatment of presidential leadership. At the end of the 20th century, the author seemed to emphasize how modern transformations in American politics have substantially altered some of the variables that have traditionally oriented the exercise of presidential leadership. In his 1997 Afterword, reflecting on the as yet unfinished Clinton presidency, he suggested that preemptive leadership might likely characterize the future.

I have not read  Skowronek's 3rd edition (2020), which took his analysis  into Trump's first term (but before his catastrophic final, pandemic year and electoral defeat). By then, events had challenged Skowronek's earlier expectation that historical patterns were being overtaken by contemporary developments. My understanding is that he grappled with whether Trump would prove reconstructive, despite deviating from the historic pattern (in that Obama was not a disjunctive president), and his analysis foresaw the possibility that Trump would become in effect a party unto himself, which he obviously has since become.

But whatever was the case then, we have since experienced the Biden interlude and Trump's triumphant return to power with all his reconstructive aspirations. I don't know what Skowronek would say (or maybe has said) about Biden and Trump II, but here is what I think.

The modern period of Plebiscitary politics continues. The successful presidents (i.e., those who have gotten reelected) have, for the most part, been charismatic figures with a direct connection with the electorate. This was especially true of Regan, Clinton, Obama, and now Trump. Recent elections have also illustrated how that direct connection highlighted the importance of the economy in voters' calculations.

When first describing reconstructive presidents, Skowronek wrote "Presidents stand preeminent in American politics when government has been most thoroughly discredited, and when political resistance to the presidency is weakest, presidents tend to remake the government wholesale. It is worth noting, however, that the commanding authority presidents wield at these moments does not automatically translate into more effective solutions to the substantive problems that gave rise to the nationwide crisis of legitimacy in the first place."

Presumably, Trump is not familiar with the political science language the author employs, but it seems safe to suggest he aspires to be a reconstructive president and appears well positioned to become one. A quick comparison with a line like this from Obama's 2013 Inaugural - "We cannot ... substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate" - effectively illustrates Trump's repudiation of the previous regime. (Indeed, Trump represents an apparently wholesale repudiation of virtually all previous iterations of the American constitutional regime.)

Of course, no one can know for certain how things will play out. But, from the unique perspective of our contentious present, the Biden presidency (which, once upon a time, seemed poised to be quite consequential, but now appears to have been but an interlude between the Two Trump presidencies) now seems to have the characteristics of a disjunctive presidency, in the tradition of the two Adamses,  Herbert Hoover, and Jimmy Carter. Skowronek first described such presidencies as affiliates of the previous regime at a time when conditions  of governance have radically altered and the regime affiliate is left "with little beyond his own personal dedication and his keen appreciation of the complexity of the nation's problems to justify his tenure." That does seem to fit Biden better, from the perspective of the present than the earlier appreciation of him - more a Carter than an LBJ. And to the extent Biden really was disjunctive - marking the final end of post-New Deal, post-Cold War liberalism, the path has been paved for Trump to become a truly reconstructive president.

On the other hand, Trump's unique personality leaves the full future trajectory of his Administration a much more open question than any historical typology may be able to accommodate.

Monday, January 27, 2025

80 Years Later

 


More than a million people, mostly Jews but including members of other groups as well, were murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland during the Second World War as part of what we now know as the Holocaust. The notorious camp was liberated by soldiers of the Soviet Army 80 years ago today on January 27, 1945.

To mark this anniversary - occurring as it does in a time of increasing anti-semitism in the world - European dignitaries, among them Britain's King Charles III, King Felipe and Queen Letizia of Spain, Crown Prince Haakon Magnus of Norway, Prince Guillaume and Princess Stephanie of Luxembourg, King Philippe and Queen Mathilde of Belgium, King Frederik X and Queen Mary of Denmark, and Princess of Orange Catharina-Amalia, have converged on Auschwitz today.

Speaking at the Jewish Community Center in Krakow, King Charles said that the anniversary "is a moment when we recall the depths to which humanity can sink when evil is allowed to flourish, ignored for too long by the world." Noting that the number of Holocaust Survivors inevitably diminishes with the passage of time, the King said that "the responsibility of remembrance rests far heavier on our shoulders, and on those of generations yet unborn."

"The act of remembering the evils of the past," King Charles stressed, "remains a vital task and in so doing, we inform our present and shape our future."

PhotoKing Philippe of Belgium, Queen Mathilde of Belgium, British King Charles III, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and King Frederik X of Denmark and Queen Mary of Denmark at the 80th Anniversary Commemoration at Auschwitz.

Wednesday, January 22, 2025

The President and the Bishop

 


Over 50 years ago, Reinhold Niebuhr lamented the potentially harmful effect of a White House invitation on a preacher. Indeed, it is no secret to anyone that proximity to political power often diminishes religious witness. But not yesterday at the National Cathedral's post-Inaugural Prayer Service attended by our new President and Vice President!

The Episcopal Bishop of Washington, Mariann Edgar Budde, preached a sermon on "the kind of unity that fosters community across diversity and division. A unity that serves the common good." Once a commonplace expression, the common good is now a radical concept, given the national turn inward in recent years. Still, it could sound like a platitude, were it not grounded, as Bishop Budde's exposition was, in a solid public theology of what it must mean to live as a community in a free society in which we do not and likely never will be in complete agreement. As foundations for unity, she highlighted honoring the inherent dignity of every human being, honesty in private and in public, and humility, recognizing our own individual limits and our need for one another. 

All that was good and edifying, if perhaps maybe somewhat potentially disconcerting to those in possession of political power. But as the preacher herself had noted earlier in her sermon, "God is never impressed with prayers when actions are not informed by them." So, she addressed the president directly, with a plea that will now be forever famous:

Millions have put their trust in you. And as you told the nation yesterday you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country. And we're scared now.

She then went on to mention some of those who have reasons to be scared. among them, of special relevance right now:

the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants, and work the night shifts in hospitals. They may not be citizens or have the proper documentation. But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues … and temples.

I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. And that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here.


Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger for we were all once strangers in this land. May God grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being; to speak the truth to one another in love. and walk humbly with each other and our God. For the good of all people in this nation and the world.

I have heard no better summary of the contemporary challenge facing the Church in relation to our political regime in the days and years to come.

PhotoBishop Mariann Edgar Budde speaking Tuesday at the Washington National Cathedral during a prayer service President Trump attended. Doug Mills/The New York Times.

Credit..Doug Mills/The New York Times

Monday, January 20, 2025

Trump II


Today, the 45th President of the United States returned to the White House as the 47th President of the United States. Only once before, in 1892, has an ex-President (Democrat Grover Cleveland) been re-elected President after a term out of office. That historical curiosity further highlights the uniqueness of this American moment. 

More important than that historical coincidence, of course, Trump's return to power is unique in more infamous ways, with which we are all familiar by now, among them his association with the January 6 coup attempt and his felony convictions in his home state.

Trump returns to the Presidency as the charismatic head of a grand coalition. In this, he is not unlike the great FDR, who managed (more or less successfully) to hold together a coalition of southern segregationists, northern urban blue-collar workers, and liberal intellectuals interested in centralized economic planning and and international order. Trump's coalition, of course, is different and includes mega-rich oligarchs, once Democratic-voting blue collar workers, and a coalition of Christian Evangelicals and conservative Catholics whose religious identity has been transformed into a political allegiance, all of whom are held together by the charisma of Donald Trump. As with the Democrats after FDR, whether and how long anyone else will be able to hold together Trump's coalition in the future remains to be seen. Indeed, even now with Trump's charisma at its apex, the factions within the Trump coalition have started sniping at each other (e.g. MAGA, personified by Steve Bannon, vs. the oligarchs, personified by Elon Musk).

The Inaugural ritual (moved indoors this year because of the extreme cold as it was in 1985) is a ceremonial enactment of the peaceful transition of power, which we have historically highlighted as a defining characteristic of our political system. The principals in the inaugural ceremony seemed committed to carry out that tradition. So President Biden did not leave the city beforehand - as John Adams did in 1801 and Donald Trump did in 2021. Everyone was there who was supposed to be there, performing his or her prescribed role. Somewhat discordantly, the tech oligarchs were also seated there in prominent places - more prominent than those nominated for seats. in the new President's Cabinet.

The once and future President took his oath. The band played Hail to the Chief, and 21 guns were fired. The President and his predecessor shook hands. The Battle Hymn of the Republic was sung. Then, marching to a somewhat different drummer,  came the Inaugural Address. 

"The golden age of American begins right now."

The President promised "to put America first" and to end the "weaponization of the Justice Department." He warned of "a crisis of trust" and denounced government's purported failures under the past Administration. It was a typically Trump litany of contemporary American failures, which the new President promises to change and thus arrest America's decline. Invoking his near-death experience last summer, he claimed he had been "saved by God to make America great again." He characterized his Inaugural as "liberation day" and called his reelection the most consequential for our country.

He announced his intent to sign a series of Executive Orders, declaring a national emergency at our southern border, reinstating the "Remain in Mexico" policy, designating cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. He also promised to bring down inflation, declaring a "National Energy Emergency," and exporting American energy all over the world. He promised to end the "Green New Deal" and revoke the electric vehicle mandate. He promised tariffs, claiming they will somehow enrich American citizens, and he promised to establish an "External Revenue Service." 

He promised a colorblind and merit-based society and declared it official policy that there are only two genders.

He promised to be a "peacemaker" and a "unifier."

But he also promised to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico and to restore President McKinley's name to the mountain that until recently bore his name in Alaska. He denounced the return of the Panama Canal to Panama, alleged the Chinese have acquired control of it, and ominously promised to take it back. He promised to increase American wealth and expand American territory.

Overall, it certainly sounded more like an election campaign speech than an Inaugural Address. The contrast between the traditional ceremonial and ritual goodwill, on the one hand, and the outburst of MAGA malevolence, on the other, was jarring, if unsurprising. It was the very opposite of hte opening words of the most famous Inaugural Address (JFK 1961): "We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom."

The majesty and solemnity of our constitutional civic religion were all on display, but the substance seemed to be challenged by the new Administration's agenda. 

Photo: Donald Trump is sworn in as the 47th president of the United States by Chief Justice John Roberts in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. Pool Photo By Julia Demaree Nikhinson

Sunday, January 19, 2025

It Happened at a Wedding

 


January is the month of new beginnings. We just recently started a new year. Today, we may be beginning a new era without Tik Tok.Tomorrow, the United States will inaugurate a new (even if  already very familiar) President. 


In her liturgy today, the Church seems to want us to recall the inauguration, so to speak, of Jesus’ public mission. The Gospel tells us that Jesus performed a miracle (changing plain water into lots of high quality wine) as the beginning of his signs in Galilee and so revealed his glory, and his disciples began to believe in him. It’s a very familiar story, noteworthy for taking place at a wedding. 


While marriage imagery and symbolism permeate the scriptures, this is the only wedding specifically mentioned in the New Testament, the only one we know for sure that Jesus attended. Of course, the account is not about the wedding per se, much less is it about marriage, despite its popular use at wedding ceremonies. It is about the beginning of his signs, about Jesus revealing his glory, and his disciples believing in him.


In the words of one 5th-century Bishop: “To those who see only with the outward eye, all these events at Cana are strange and wonderful; to those who understand, they are also signs.” [Faustus of Riez, Sermon 5 of Epiphany 2].


That said, it all happened at a wedding. 


Weddings have always been big events, perhaps the biggest events in most communities as two families form an alliance to create a new family. For most of human history, weddings have been celebrations not just of a couple’s union and of family alliances, but of the continuation of the human race. In the face of the inevitably limited lifespan of everyone there, a wedding defiantly declares that the human story will continue generation after generation (which is why declining marriage rates in a society are seen as so precarious!).


As for this particular wedding, the 20th-century Catholic TV Bishop Fulton Sheen suggested that perhaps it was the wedding of one of Mary’s and Jesus’ relatives, which was what gave Mary a family reason to ask Jesus to intervene. Sheen also suggested that, since Jesus had brought his disciples, they may have contributed to the wine running out!


Who knows? But, again, it did all happen at a wedding.


We today may tend to think of weddings as very fancy, special events. But, in one sense, certainly a wedding is a very ordinary event. Human beings have been doing this on a regular basis in every known society for thousands of years. The Anglican Book of Common Prayer famously describes marriage as instituted of God in the time of man's innocency - meaning that it goes back to God’s original plan for human beings even before sin entered the world. By choosing a wedding for the first of his signs, Jesus not only honored and sanctified the institution of marriage, he also honored and sanctified ordinary human life, the way we live in the world day-in day-out, as human beings and together in society, the things that make us who we are. Jesus here bumps our ordinary daily work and play up a grade, from water to wine, from our ordinary day-to-day activities to our highest hopes and aspirations, which can only be fulfilled through him, with him, and in him.


There is challenge as well as opportunity here - a challenge to take seriously what we do day-in and day-out, what we make of this new year, this time without Tik Tok, this new political era, etc.


I suspect that this was what the second Vatican Council had in mind when it said that nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in the hearts of those who follow Christ. Like the disciples at Cana, we are being invited to experience the water of our ordinary lives upgraded to the wine of following Christ.


Homily for the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, January 19, 2025.


Photo: Saint Paul the Apostle Church in Ordinary Time 2025.

 

Friday, January 17, 2025

September 5 (The Movie)

 


I was just starting my senior year in College, when the 1972 Munich Olympics were disrupted by a terrorist attack on the Israeli Olympic team, resulting eventually in nine Israeli deaths. In the aftermath of October 7, 2023, Israelis don't need any new evidence that terrorist murder is a prime weapon in the anti-Israeli arsenal. Nor should we, but perhaps it is good that we be reminded on the decades-long history of anti-Israeli terror.

September 5 is a film that chronicles the actual historic Munich massacre from the perspective of the ABC Sports crew that happened to be there, covering the Olympics. It stars Peter Sarsgard as Roone Arledge (ABC Sports President), John Magaro as Geoffrey Mason, (head of the control room in Munich), and Leonie Benesch as Marianne Gebhardt (a German staffer, the only one in the room who understood German). There is also some archival footage from the actual event, including Jim McKay and Peter Jennings.

The film fully captures the tragedy of the event, even while its focus is primarily not in the Olympic Village but in the ABC Sports broadcasting facility. It takes us back to a seemingly long lost world of rotary phones and highlights the inherent tensions of covering such an event live in real time, including on-the-spot quick decisions and errors. It also illustrates the impact of commercial rivalry with other news networks and even with other divisions within the same network.

The film stays focused on the crew and what they go through. We get glimpses of the larger picture - of, for example, the tensions about continuing the Olympics while all this was going on, and of the historical anxieties felt in a special way by the German hosts of the Olympics. But, despite being set in such a seemingly different media world (now more than half a century ago), the film's contemporary resonance remains relevant and vivid.

Friday, January 10, 2025

Biden in the Sunset

 


There is a saying about "the best laid plans." President Joe Biden had planned to make a final visit to Rome this week, which would have included a final presidential audience with the Pope, but - dutiful to the end - the President is remaining in the U.S. because of the fires in California. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that the President has canceled his trip “to remain focused on directing the full federal response in the days ahead.”

Our second Catholic president (unlike the first one) has never been shy about his faith and has highlighted his Catholicism continuously. In 10 days, he will yield his place as the most prominent U.S. Catholic to Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, a convert whose style of Catholicism may appear somewhat different from Biden's. At least until he leaves the White House, however, Biden has consistently keep his religious commitments at the center of public perception of him.

Biden ("Scranton Joe") represents a particular style of American Catholicism, rooted in the ethnic Church's 20th-century heyday in the northeast. His is a "liberal" style of Catholicism, that talks about "social justice" and sings On Eagle's Wings (which he couldn't resist quoting even in his otherwise excellent eulogy for Jimmy Carter). Biden's style of Catholicism has much to commend it even if, like the President himself, it may appear in some ways to be fading from the American scene. 

U.S. Catholicism is increasingly a broad religious identity comprised of many coexisting, sometimes overlapping, and sometimes competing subcultures. In that mix, Joe Biden may well represent some of the best of 1970s "social justice' On Eagle's Wings Catholicism. When he praised Jimmy Carter's deep Christian faith in his eulogy at the National Cathedral, Biden was unabashedly expressing his own lifelong religious commitments. Describing Carter as "driven and devoted to making real the words of his Savior" and "a good and faithful servant of God," Biden was surely also surely expressing his own aspirations to put his own deep Catholic faith into practice through a political vocation. His is not the only possible style of American Catholicism, and his may not be the only effective way to live out a Catholic political vocation, but it is surely one very fruitful way.

Indeed, as Pope Francis recently wrote in his encyclical letter promoting devotion to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, "our work as Christians for the betterment of society should not obscure its religious inspiration, for that, in the end, would be to seek less for our brothers and sisters than what God desires to give them" (Dilexit Nos, 205)

Photo: President Biden, Vice President Harris, and former Presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump at the State Funeral for Jimmy Carter, Chip Somodevilla/Getty

Wednesday, January 8, 2025

Memorializing Jimmy Carter

 


This week, the nation is formally memorializing its 39th President, Jimmy Carter (1924-2024), with the now familiar rituals of a formal public state funeral in the nation's capital.

Jimmy Carter lived 100 years, during which he was a naval officer, a peanut farmer, a state Governor, a lifelong Sunday School teacher, and a Nobel-prize winning humanitarian. He was President of the United States for four of those years, from 1977 to 1981. As a southern politician and Georgia's Governor from 1971 to 1975, Carter successfully navigated the Democratic party's traumatic transition from the party of segregation to the party of civil rights. However, he was a one-term president, and one-term presidents are usually not well remembered by American history. His term was effectively a brief Democratic interlude in the long period of Republican domination of the White House that began with Richard Nixon's election in 1968 and ceased (temporarily) with Bill Clinton's election in 1992. The 1976 election was, of course, the post-Watergate election and the Democrats' win was very much a popular reaction against the Republicans because of Watergate (and President Ford's pardon of former President Nixon).

So Carter's presidency was a bit of an outlier from the start. As importantly, if not more so, Carter himself was an outlier, a self-professed "outsider." Americans do seem to like electing outsiders (e.g., Obama, Trump). Unfortunately, at least in normal times, governing is about relationships and expertise. In other words, it is an insider activity. And that, as much as anything else, may help explain why Carter's presidency seemed so unsuccessful in its time.

With the famous exception of the Camp David Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel, which was clearly Carter's great personal accomplishment as president, Carter's tenure in the White House was largely perceived as a failure. There was inflation (worse than the inflation that supposed helped defeat Kamala Harris this past year). There as an energy crisis with long lines at gas stations. There was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the American boycott of the 1980 Olympics. And, worst of all, there was the Iranian hostage crisis, widely perceived as an extreme example of foreign-policy failure. All this proved Carter's undoing. I vividly remember Ronald Reagan's campaign line on the troubled economy, which ended something like, "Recovery will be when Mr. Carter is out of a job."

In a sense, Carter's presidency was a transitional presidency - a transition from the post New Deal, post-war liberal consensus, in which Republicans Richard Nixon (and to a lesser extent Gerald Ford) fully shared, a transition from that post New Deal, post-war liberal consensus to Reaganite "conservatism," a transition from an ever more tentative evolution toward democracy to an increasingly obvious oligarchy.

That said, as has already been pointed out by others, the disastrous ideological turn associated with the Reagan victory in 1980 was already getting its start in the Carter years. It was Carter, after all, who started "deregulation." 

Part of being an "outsider" was being less politically connected with the traditional New Deal coalition, centered on organized labor. This contributed to a degree of liberal disillusionment with Carter during his presidency, which led to Senator Edward Kennedy's extremely unsuccessful 1980 primary challenge. As often happens when incumbent presidents are challenged by dissidents within their own party, Kennedy's challenge weakened Carter and the Democrats in the campaign against Reagan. 

Carter left the White House on January 20, 1981, and began his almost 44 years of post-presidency. It now seems expected of ex-presidents that they will settle somewhere other than where they originally came from, play golf, and make lots of money. Jimmy Carter, in contrast, returned home to Plains, GA, where he started the Carter Center, and devoted the rest of his long life to doing good around the world - working to eradicate diseases and promote human rights. A devout Baptist Sunday School teacher, he exemplified putting faith into action - an admirable alternative to playing golf and making money.

Photo: Vice President Harris and husband honor President Jimmy Carter lying-in-state, U.S. Capito, January 7, 2025Jack Gruber, USA TODAY.




Monday, January 6, 2025

Counting the Votes



What a difference four years makes! As required by the constitution and on the date prescribed in the law, the Congress met in joint session early this afternoon, with Kamala Harris presiding in her role as President of the Senate, to count the electoral votes for President and Vice President. Like Richard Nixon in 1961 and Al Gore in 2001, it fell to her to announce her own defeat, adding a personal poignancy to what has in the past typically been an essential but simple and straightforwardly uncontentious political ritual.

Last tine, of course, it was anything but simple and straightforward as various Republican members unjustifiably challenged the electoral vote, while an insurrectionary  MAGA mob stormed the Capitol in an effort to prevent the government from transacting its business and undo the peaceful process of constitutional democracy. Perhaps because so many members felt personally endangered, there was a brief bipartisan moment recognizing the wrongness of all this. But that moment as far too brief. Four years later, the election-denying party is set to return to power, in part because constitutional democratic government mattered less to the electorate than the proverbial price of eggs.

This time the only inconvenience in carrying out the constitutionally mandated counting of the votes was the snow, which covered Washington in winter beauty - a naturally induced dramatic contrast to the human and political ugliness on display there four years ago. What turned into an ugly and dangerous 15-hour drama four years ago was all peacefully over and done with in about a half an hour. Of course, there were no surprises as the four tellers took turns reading the vote tallies of each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Donald Trump and J.D. Vance each received 312 votes. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz each received 226 votes.

The Republicans couldn't resist interrupting the announcement of the vote, jumping up to applaud when Harris announced Trump's tally. So, of course, the Democrats had to do the same when she announced her votes, thus highlighting the country's progressive descent into tribalism. That said, the votes have now been counted. We now have a President-elect and a Vice President-elect. The peaceful passage of political power from one party to another has been properly proclaimed and will duly take place in two weeks. All is as it is supposed to be in a constitutional democracy.

But, of course, that is only because those who lost are believers in constitutional democracy  and practiced what they preach. Had the election gone the other way, we might well have seen significant efforts to contest the result. Our national commitment to constitutional democracy has been upheld and maintained, but its broad endorsement and depth of support among the electorate have been sorely tested.

Photo: Vice President Kamala Harris, President of the Senate, and House Speaker Mike Johnson preside at joint session of Congress to count the electoral votes. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Sunday, January 5, 2025

Congestion Pricing Comes to Manhattan

 

Sunday, January 5, 2025, it finally happened - almost miraculously, given all the opposition. Today, congestion pricing went into effect in Manhattan below 60th Street, as New York at last caught up with London and other foreign cities in requiring cars to pay for some small share of the damage they cause the environment and the social life of urban spaces. That was, in fact, (according to one eyewitness) written on one of the signs held by some who, despite the cold,  turned out to celebrate the event, "THANK YOU FOR PAYING A TINY SHARE OF THE DAMAGE YOUR CAR CAUSES" (see Christopher Bonanos, "It's On" New York Magazine).

From now on - at least until reactionary forces succeed in rolling it back - most cars coming into the designated congestion-pricing zone (Manhattan below 60th Street) will pay a toll (as much as $9.00). For months, cameras have been set up at the 60th Street boundary point (photo), waiting to be turned on, to monitor the traffic - and bill cars for the privilege of using and abusing New York's streets and neighborhoods.

It is but a small victory in the larger war of returning the city and its streets and neighborhoods to their rightful owners - the people. How many drivers will actually change their behavior in response to this financial disincentive remains to be seen. And, as always, there may be unintended and unforeseen consequences. Meanwhile, the incoming President is unsurprisingly opposed to the program. So efforts to undo congestion pricing will likely continue. And like so much of human progress, it may well be rolled back. But, for now at least, cars are at last being charged for at least some of the damage one of the 20th-century's most destructive inventions has so long been imposing on our society with such impunity.

Photo: Entering the congestion-pricing zone at 60th Street and Columbus Avenue.