Ancient Christianities (The Book)

 

Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years (Princeton U. Pr., 2024) is Paula Fredriksen's latest contribution to our enhanced appreciation of the ancient Mediterranean world in which Christianity arose and took root. 

Scholars get reviewed by fellow scholars. So this is not a review, but just an appreciation. Ever since her Augustine and the Jews (Yale U. Pr., 2008), I have admired and been enlightened by her capacity to bring the ancient, late-Roman world to life like none other (except the inestimable Peter Brown).

The plural title - Ancient Christianities - is key to her approach. There is a received history of Christianity which recounts the Church's growth from the perspective of the winning side, from th perspective of doctrinal orthodoxy and inherited practices. In fact, however, the losers in that history - the heretics and schismatics - did not necessarily all start out that way. They were part of early Christianity's "large cast of characters" who competed with one another for popular (and eventually imperial) acceptance, all part of what Fredriksen calls "the complexities and ambiguities, the ironies and surprises, the twists and turns of this richer story." Indeed, I think one appreciates the accomplishment of Nicaean and imperial orthodoxy that much more as one wades through the challenges presented by the opposition and the varying appeals which opposing ideas had.

From Second Temple Judaism through the triumph of imperial Chalcedonian orthodoxy, Fredriksen navigates the beliefs and practices of the range of ancient Christians. Not just the writings and sermons of Church Fathers get attention, however, but also the varied beliefs and behaviors of those we might call ordinary Christians, what today we might call popular religion. We experience the intersection of Christian faith and civic practices (public games, theatrical spectacles, etc.), celebrations of saints' days rooted in ancient Roman familial festivals, complete with "dancing and singing as well as eating and drinking," along with other inherited popular practices and unauthorized ritual behavior (e.g., amulets), which shed new light on what may have been the actual, if unofficial, boundaries of Christian behavior and practices.

It has often been noted that elite Christian culture, in its adoption of Greek philosophy and Roman institutions somewhat syncretized itself with the existing dominant culture, in ways which advanced the Christian religion while preserving important aspects of that pre-Christian culture. One of the beauties of Fredriksen's book is showing how something analogous was going on at the popular level. She writes "all Christian culture, high no less than low, was made up of elements from the world that everyone lived in. What was the option? From where else could building blocks be quarried? There was no view from nowhere, above and outside of the world one lived in ... 'Paganism' - not an -ism, but simply majority Mediterranean culture - framed the whole."

All this is very insightful about early Christianity, but it is also helpfully relevant to our present predicament, in which popular "spirituality" seems increasingly entwined with otherwise perhaps problematic aspects of contemporary culture. Both at the level of high theology and that of popular piety, the fact is we live in this combination of somewhat secularized, somewhat disenchanted, somewhat re-enchanted modern world, with which Christian faith must engage and by which it is inevitably influenced.

Ascension Thursday

 

Alternate-Side-of-the-Street Parking Regulations are suspended in New York City today in observance of Ascension Thursday.

I always love hearing that every year on this holy day! If notign else it shoudl serve as a reminder to take this hoy day much more seriously!

One advantage of being old is what one remembers from the past. For example, I am old enough to remember when, immediately after the Gospel on Ascension Thursday, the Easter Candle – our very visible symbol of the unique presence of the Risen Christ – was ceremonially extinguished, and then disappeared from the sanctuary. Even more dramatically, in certain places, the Easter Candle might be hoisted up into the Church’s roof until it disappeared. [For a video of this custom carried out at the Duomo in Milan in 2019, go to https://youtu.be/D277FhicPYs at about 22:30] In some places, when this was done in the past, the people would stand and stretch out their arms, while a shower of roses would recall Christ’s parting promise to send the Holy Spirit to his Church.

(Of course, my memory of the past is embellished by knowledge of what was supposed to be done and was in fact done in many places. In my own home parish, minimalism reigned. The Easter candle would be lit on Easter Sunday and then barely seen again until it wa slit - in order to be extinguished - on Ascension!)

Such quaint customs recall those familiar pictures of the Ascension that show the disciples staring up at an empty space – sometimes with two feet sticking out from a cloud (with holes in them, just to make sure we know who it is that is missing!) The point, of course, of all such customs and practices is to highlight that Jesus has now (in some sense) moved on, and that we are now (in some sense) left behind. 

What exactly does it mean for us to be supposedly left behind? Does it mean that we have been left alone?

Historically speaking, what the Ascension commemorates is the end of that short period - Luke in today's familiar first reading quantifies it as 40 days [Acts 1:3] - when the Risen Christ appeared several times to his disciples after the resurrection. After that, those appearances ended. And the disciples were left behind to do the work the Risen Lord had given them to do. 

Left behind, but not quite alone, since Christ continues in his Church through his gift of the Holy Spirit. “I am sending the promise of my Father upon you,” the departing Jesus said to his disciples in today's gospel reading, “so stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high [Luke 24:49]. So, Jesus may be gone, but he is still with us in a very real way. Reflecting on this continued presence, Pope Benedict XVI wrote: "'Ascension' does not mean departure into a remote region of the cosmos but, rather, the continuing closeness that the disciples experience so strongly that it becomes a source of lasting joy."

Meanwhile, the Ascension highlights for us that Jesus is now, as we say week after week, seated at the right had of the Father. Thus, just as he is still really with us here, through the gift of the Holy Spirit and in the sacraments we celebrate, so we too are also in some sense with him there. So we pray in today’s Mass, we celebrate the most sacred day on which your Only begotten Son, our Lord, placed at the right hand of your glory our weak human nature, which he had united to himself. In having his Son’s humanity enthroned at his side in heaven, God now has at his side in a sense the whole human world, which his Son embraced in himself and experienced to the full. And so now, having experienced our world with us (and in the process having invested it with more meaning that it would ever otherwise have had), God in turn now shares his world with us. For where Christ has gone, there we hope to follow. Where he is now, there we hope to be.

As Saint Augustine said. in his 'Ascension sermon: Out of compassion for us he descended from heaven, and although he ascended alone, we also ascend, because we ar ei nhim by grace. Thus the Ascension is also about us, as well as about Jesus – not just about our being left behind, but about what is now in store for us thanks to Jesus’ resurrection, and about what goes on in the meantime. The Ascension sets the stage for that hoped-for future, which we get a glimpse of already in the present in Jesus, who, although ascended, still invites us to approach him even now – as today's epistle reading says with a sincere heart and in absolute trust [Hebrews 10:22].

O Canada!

 

I lived and worked in Toronto, Canada, for six years from 1994 through 2000, an effective and fulfilling parish ministry which I remember fondly along with so many wonderful people I got to know there and a sovereign country I came to appreciate in so many ways. While hosting visitors in 1995, I was asked why I thought Canada had never become part of the U.S. I reminded my guests that the U.S. had tried on two occasions to conquer Canada and had failed both times, and that the Canadians were really quite content to be their own very different country, with very different political institutions (e.g. a parliamentary system) and many social benefits (e.g. health care).

After the British defeated the French in what Americans remember as the French and Indian War (1763), French Canada became part of British North America. In the Quebec Act (1774), the British parliament formalized the governmental structure for Britain's new French-speaking North American colony. Importantly, the Act also granted Roman Catholics religious freedom and allowed them to hold positions in government, which would become a major point of contention with the English-speaking Protestant colonists to the south. They in turn famously expressed their resentment in their Declaration of Independence, which attacked Britain "For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighboring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies." So it was no wonder that efforts to persuade their Catholic French-speaking neighbors to join in the revolution failed so abysmally, as did subsequent military efforts to accomplish the equivalent by force!

The American War of Independence was also very much a civil war within the colonies themselves and within the larger territory of British North America. In the end, it created not one country but two. Many “United Empire Loyalists,” who opposed the revolution, fled the new United States, some to Britain, many to what is now Ontario, whose coat of arms still includes the words Ut incepit fidelis sic permanet (“As she began loyal, so loyal she remains”).

By the War of 1812 (the second unsuccessful U.S. attempt to conquer Canada militarily), almost three-quarters of the inhabitants of "Upper Canada" (Ontario), were people who had left what became the U.S. or were the children of those who had done so. These experiences helped forge a distinctively non-U.S. Canadian identity. This sense of Canada as a self-conscious alternative to the U.S. is reflected in the famous Canadian phrase “peace, order and good government,” which is in obvious contrast to the American Revolution's "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

Much has changed in both our countries over the years, but the sense of Canadian distinctiveness has perdured. If anything, Canadian nationalism has been given a new injection of energy by recent U.S. rhetoric. It may be understandable, given the unique trajectory of U.S. history, for Americans to think everyone else would like to be like us, but the fact is that that is just not the case - clearly not in Canada!

In his beautifully bi-lingual Speech from the Throne in Ottawa today, Canada's current King noted "a renewed sense of national pride, unity, and hope" and invoked "Canada's unique identity." As the King said, "The True North is, indeed, strong and free."

Photo: Canada's King Charles III opening the current session of Canada's Parliament, May 27, 2025. (Image from BBC News)

"It Is the Decision of the Holy Spirit and of Us"

 

For much of human history, people have lived in empires, which usually included a multitude of nations. The first Christians, of course, lived under the Roman Empire, which included a great variety of nations. We’ll hear 16 of them mentioned two weeks from now in the First Reading on Pentecost Sunday. Jesus and his disciples were, of course, Jews. For Jews – both the Jews in Israel and those in the Diaspora in the rest of the Roman Empire or elsewhere in the Persian Empire – for them, the main distinction was between themselves and everyone else, between Jews and Gentiles. The mission of the earthly Jesus was primarily among his fellow Jews. The first Christians were Jews who had come to believe that Jesus was the Messiah sent by God to fulfill the promises made to Israel.

So, imagine everyone’s surprise when Gentiles also started responding to the good news about Jesus and asking for baptism! Of course, it was always possible for a Gentile to cross over to Judaism – to abandon pagan practices and convert to the worship of the one true God – but only by being circumcised according to Mosaic practice, and separating from the Gentile world. And yet the Apostle Peter himself on at least one occasion and now Paul and Barnabas on a more regular basis had proclaimed the gospel to Gentiles and had baptized them - without requiring them to become Jews first. How was this possible? 

No one should underestimate how unexpected and difficult this development was and how disruptive it was in the life of the early Church. And yet, faced with a crisis they certainly had not been expecting and for which nothing in their previous background had really prepared them, but on which the entire future of Christianity was going to depend, that first generation of Christians nonetheless faced the challenge to resolve the problem in a radically new way, reassessing everything they had assumed up until then in light of the fundamental experience they shared with the Gentile converts – faith in the Risen Lord Jesus Christ.

Now we all know how they solved the problem. We just heard the decision read to us [Acts 15:1-2, 22-29]. Just as those Jews could had accepted Jesus had become Jewish Christians, so too Greeks, while still remaining Greek, could follow Jesus and become Greek – not Jewish – Christians. Likewise, Romans could become Roman Christians, etc. This radical decision simultaneously affirmed the universal application of Christ to all peoples without exception, while also allowing for diversity within what, in today’s terminology, we would call a multi-cultural Church. Historically, it was this decision that made it possible for Christianity, which had seemed to start as just a small Jewish sect, to expand throughout the ancient world and to continue to expand into a truly global community. 

Thanks to that fundamental experience, that both Jewish and Gentile converts shared, of the new thing that had happened in the world with Jesus, they felt empowered to resolve the problem. Note their choice of words: “It is the decision of the Holy Spirit and of us.”

In the ancient Mediterranean world of small city-states, the greatest thing one could be was a citizen, entitled to participate in community discussion and debate. But citizenship as an active way of life (as opposed to just passive possession of rights and privileges) had seriously deteriorated as small city-states had been absorbed into one enormous empire. Discussion and debate had diminished, and people had lost the sense that they could accomplish anything through political participation. Yet, faced with the unexpected, the Christians felt able to resolve it by confidently open discussion and debate. Their confidence, of course, was in the Holy Spirit, the Risen Christ’s gift to his Church. When they said “It is the decision of the Holy Spirit and of us,” they were not equating themselves with the Holy Spirit but rather were recognizing that the Holy Spirit had really been at work in what was happening – Gentiles joining the Church – and was with them then in their collective effort to make sense of it.

So often we feel overwhelmed by problems - rather than challenged by them – and so react passively, as if we were silent spectators in the story of our lives. It was not easy for the early Christians to give up their inherited assumptions about the necessity of circumcision and Jewish observance. But they were empowered to do so by the power of the Risen Christ continually present and active in his Church through the Holy Spirit, teaching them to interpret their new experience.

The history of the Church was irrevocably shaped by this event. This “Council of Jerusalem,” as it came to be called, became a model for how to come to grips with new and pressing problems. The abridged account we read skips right to the decision, but before that decision there was a meeting of Church leaders to discuss the matter. This quickly became the model in subsequent centuries as local bishops began to assemble regularly in councils on a provincial level. Then, 1700 years ago, in May 325, the first ecumenical, that is, world-wide, Council of the Church assembled at Nicea, in what is modern-day Turkey, to resolve a growing conflict about Jesus’ divinity. The result was the Nicene Creed, which affirms one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father.

Since Nicea, another 20 ecumenical councils have met to address conflicts and divisions in the Church, with the first meeting in Jerusalem as a model of how to proceed - neither never moving forward nor casually jettisoning the past, but rather carefully considering everything in light of the fundamental experience of what the Risen Christ has revealed.

As a result, the new Jerusalem is an all-inclusive, yet widely diverse society, in which the Risen Lord has brought us all together as one new people and has empowered us with his peace [John 14:27] – not quite peace as the world gives peace, but precisely the kind of peace the world needs so much.

Homily for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, May 25, 2025.

Original Sin (The Book)

 

As anyone who is interested in American politics knows by now, Original Sin (Penguin Random House) by journalists Jake Tapper (CNN) and Alex Thompson (Axios) is not about the primeval sin of Adam, but - in the words of the book's subtitle - President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. By this week's publication date, so much had been written and said about the book (not to mention all that had already been written and said about the broader topic) that reading the book itself might seem almost redundant.  Yet it is still a very informative exercise.

Enjoyable too as reading, but also tragic as an account of the state of our politics. “The original sin of Election 2024," write the book's authors, "was Biden’s decision to run for re-election — followed by aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment.” The book is a frightfully step-by-step account of how the people closest to President Biden enabled and facilitated his disastrous determination to run for a second term, paradoxically resulting in the very thing this effort was supposedly all about avoiding - Trump's return to the White House. (That outcome has to be an inseparable part of the analysis. The end result - especially this end result - really matters.) 

It is a genuinely damning indictment of much of the Democratic party's political class, in particular the "Politburo" in the White House and the Biden family itself. In my modest opinion, it should also serve as an indictment of the authors' own journalistic class, which (not for the first time in American history) was also at least somewhat somewhat in the know about the president's aging (or at least the widespread worries about it) and certainly should have been more proactively critical about what was happening.

For the record, I have admired Joe Biden as president and willingly credit him for some very effective leadership both domestically and on the international scene (Ukraine, NATO). Although i voted for someone else in the 2020 primary, by then I knew it would be Joe Biden who would most likely be the one to save the party from Bernie Sanders and save the country from Donald Trump. But none of that meant he should run for a second term. Like the aide quoted in the book, "I love Joe Biden," but "it was a disservice to the country and to the party for his family and advisers to allow him to run again."

The book effectively highlights what is one of the many disadvantages of our presidential system (in contrast to a parliamentary system). The U.S. President is an uncrowned king, and there exists no effective mechanism for replacing him by party leaders or others. Like the Roman Empire of old, our presidential system resembles a mighty monarchy masquerading as a republic. Combine this will the prevailing notion that only two-term presidents are successful (a particularly perverse incentive increasingly built into the modern presidency), combine this with the insulation of modern presidents from public opinion by politically ambitious sycophantic staffs, and finally the widespread acceptance of gerontocracy in the U.S. government, and the inevitable result was the 2024 disaster. "Biden had framed his entire presidency as a pitched battle to prevent Trump from returning to the Oval Office. By not relinquishing power and being honest with himself and the country about his decline, he guaranteed it."

One can acknowledge (as I do) the real accomplishments of the Biden presidency. One can continue to admire the man and to wish him well in this latest health crisis. At a personal level, the story is a truly tragic one. It has been suggested that Biden's difficulties may largely date from the effects of his son Beau's death and then were exacerbated by his son Hunter's personal and legal problems.  

At the same time, the Democratic party and the country need to come to some reckoning about what went wrong in the run-up to 2024 and to acknowledge the colossal errors on the part of the President, his family, his "politburo," and others.

Some would suggest that the even earlier original sin was the selection of Kamala Harris as running mate in 2020. At the time, I thought there were better alternatives available, and it appears from this book that Biden himself may have thought so. But what was bizarre about this was that, once in office as Vice President, Harris, instead of being supported as a possible successor, was widely used as some sort of insurance to justify Biden's running again, on the theory that Harris could not win against Trump. In the end, of course, she didn't win. But had Biden announced at the end of 2022 (after the midterms) that he would not run again, the party primary process might well have chosen either a stronger candidate than Harris or alternately a candidate Harris who was more practiced and better positioned to defeat Trump. Despite his impressive win 2024, Trump's reelection was not inevitable and might have been prevented by a more timely process of raising up a younger more dynamic candidate than Biden.

If I keep harping on the election, it is because the consequence of this tragic chain of events is what matters - has been so, well, consequential. Of course, presidential health issues - and cover-ups - are not new. In fact, they have been all too common and surprisingly consistent. From Woodrow Wilson to FDR to JFK to to Biden, the consistent pattern has been for the political and journalistic classes to obscure the truth from the American people. In this case only, however, has the outcome been so catastrophically consequential for the life of the nation.

In the months before Biden's disastrous debate with Trump in June 2024, like many I assumed there was a distinction between doing the job, which, again like many, I believed Biden still capable of doing adequately, and the performative, communicative parts of the job, which he was obviously failing at, but which I was willing to argue were less important and somewhat overrated by our contemporary media culture. There is, I think, still good reason to believe that Biden remained effective in those areas in which he was most engaged - e.g., Ukraine, NATO, and, after October 7, the war in Gaza. However, he was notably ineffective, for example, on immigration, which turned out to be immensely consequential for the election. Tapper and Thompson cite Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO) who "had come to believe that Biden's inability to mediate between the people in his administration with different political viewpoints had led to an incoherent overall position on the issue" of immigration. And they cite former Chief-of-Staff Ron Klain's belief that Biden's being "kind of locked down in the White House" in 2023 and focused on foreign affairs "had diminished his ability to talk fluidly about a broad range of domestic political issues."

The book's coverage of the final crisis becomes a literal day-by-day account after the debate (which Tapper had co-moderated). That period included the infamous interview with George Stephanopoulos, in which Biden was asked how he would feel if he lost and Trump were re-elected. He replied, "I'll feel good as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as [sic] job as i know I can do, that's what this is about." The authors record Nancy Pelosi's internal reaction that that was not enough, since the stakes were so high. This highlights the apparent conflict between the personal and the political, between the personal President's interest and the public interest.

The other dimension of the crisis which became more evident in the aftermath of the debate was the contrast between what had been claimed about the President's fitness and what the entire debate audience had seen for themselves. Congresswoman Susan Wild (D-PA) articulated this when she said on a congressional Democratic zoom, "If I defend the president, I lose my integrity. How do we go after Trump for lying if people see us as liars?"

In a sense, that summarizes the problem that persists for the Democrats. There are undoubtedly many reasons why the Democrats lost the confidence of American voters, but surely an important contributor was the failure of the Democratic political class to be fully honest about such a serious problem.

It is often remarked how the Republicans seem blinded to political reality by partisanship and an apparent personalty cult. This story suggests that, for a time at least, so were the Democrats. In the end, the Democrats recovered, but too late.

Nicaea + 1700

 

The "Nicene Creed" (technically called the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed) which we sing or say at Mass every Sunday is an expansion by the First Ecumenical Council of Constantinople (381) of the original creed composed at the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea (325). We rightly refer to its as the Nicene Creed, however, given that the fundamental work was done at that first Council, convened by Emperor Constantine, which first assembled 1700 years ago today. It had been one of the late Pope Francis' fond hopes to travel to Iznik, Turkey, the site of the Council of Nicaea, sometime this year to commemorate this anniversary with the Ecumenical Patriarch Batholomew.

The Creed itself, which was adopted on June 19, 325, summarizes the result of the Council's deliberations. The Council confirmed and articulated in philosophical language the faith of the Church about who Jesus is and his relationship to his Father and also to us. (According to legend, as recounted by Eusebius of Caesarea, it was the Emperor Constantine himself who suggested the key term homoousios, "consubstantial," to describe the relationship between the Father and the Son.) Nicaea actually initiated a protracted conciliar process of doctrinal definition about who Christ is which would continue at Constantinople in 381, Ephesus in 431, and finally Chalcedon in 481.

When we mention Nicaea, we think especially of how it described the relationship between the Father and the Son within Trinity, but the Nicene Creed continues, elaborating on the mission of the Son and especially highlighting his incarnation. (Anyone above a certain age can recall dropping to his or her knees when the Creed got to the words et incarnatus est.)

Nicaea did other things as well. Famously, its decision on the determination of the date of Easter, a calculation which all Christians still follow (albeit with different calendars), highlighted Christianity's fundamental relationship with its parent religion of Judaism. 

But the Creed and the philosophical formulations which the Creed enshrines remain the great and lasting legacy of Nicaea. I remember many years ago a conversation with a now-deceased confrere who was speculating whether the Church might have been better served had she not adopted Greek philosophical formulations for expressing doctrines. In response, I repeated the obvious observation that this was how the Church learned to speak to the wider late-Roman culture, which her evangelizing mission required. How, I asked, could the Church have spoken to the wider world had she not adopted Greek philosophical formulas? My confrere answered that the Church would surely have found a way, to which I replied that, well, that was exactly what the Church did at Nicaea! The Church found a way to speak intelligibly to the world at Nicaea, and Nicaea remains the model for what the Church must continue to do in relating to the world.

"In the One, We Are One"

 

At his first appearance as Supreme Pontiff, our Augustinian Pope Leo XIV quoted one of Saint Augustine's more famous sayings, With you I am a Christian; for you I am a bishop. So, it should surprise no one that the new Pontiff's Coat of Arms contains an Augustinian motif: a closed book with a heart pierced by an arrow, a reference to Saint Augustine's description of his conversion experience, Vulnerasti cor meum verbo tuo (“You have pierced my heart with your Word”). Likewise, the Pope's heraldic motto, In Illo uno unum ("In the One, we are one")  is taken from Saint Augustine’s Exposition on Psalm 127, where he noted that although we Christians are many, we are one in the one Christ.

Much of the media coverage of our new Pope has, understandably, focused on popular perceptions of him and his election and interesting vignettes from his life story. Alternately, much of the media coverage has, equally understandably, emphasized the possible political implications of this new pontificate. That is all fine as far as it goes. But, of course the papacy is more than just another human interest story, and it is infinitely more than yet another player in our contentious contemporary politics.

It has often been remarked that Sunday Mass in a typical American Catholic parish may be one of the very few places remaining where different people of different ethnicities and economic classes and of different political parties and conflicting opinions still assemble together and share in a common experience. This is a most amazing and pastorally suggestive opportunity for our politically polarized and empathy-challenged society.  It is an opportunity - for which the Church is uniquely equipped - to demonstrate the unity it professes, to pour oil on the troubled waters of modern society, as Servant of God Isaac Hecker remarked to Blessed Pope Pius IX in 1857.

Politics is about the organization of our very human, very finite communal life. Inevitably, it involves disagreements - and provides mechanisms to resolve disagreements. The intensely polarized disagreements we currently experience, however, are not just the inevitable accompaniment of disagreements about finitely human practical concerns, but the result of a profoundly perverse loss of empathy, which has become increasingly common in recent years. That lack of empathy, that failure to recognize a neighbor in the other, is what so severely poisons our politics today.

In Illo uno unum ("In the One, we are one")  reminds us that all others are also neighbors. What human unity we have failed to achieve by natural means has been freely made possible for us by the grace of Christ, in whom all human divisions have become secondary.

No one who was not part of the conclave can assert with any certainty how much or how little contemporary political considerations may have contributed to the election of the 267th Pope. But, as I suggested in my first reflections upon this Pope's election, perhaps inadvertently, in electing a Pope from the U.S., the Cardinals may have have done the world and especially the U.S. an unexpected service in presenting the world with an alternative, empathetic, unifying type of American leader, different from what we have increasingly become accustomed to. 

Pope Leo XIV

 

The College of Cardinals have elected as successor of Saint Peter a Chicago-born American, Augustinian friar and missionary Bishop, Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, 69, who has taken the name Pope Leo XIV.

Growing up in the Bronx in the 1950s and 1960s, I received my initial religious formation from the Augustinian Friars of the Province of Saint Thomas of Villanova, who staffed the parish I lived in and who taught in my high school. That - and my longstanding intellectual interest in and devotion to the great Doctor gratiae Saint Augustine - all added to my evident excitement when his name was announced. An American Pope! An Augustinian! His Order's former Prior General and a long-time missionary Bishop in Peru!

As an American, a member of an international Religious Order, and a missionary Bishop in Peru (Bishop of Chiclayo, 2014-2023) the new Pope spans the New World and the Old World, the rich First World and the poor Global South. He is well positioned to be a unifying figure in a Church and a world which seem so destructively divided. A spiritual son of Saint Augustine, whose charism he referenced in his opening remarks from the loggia, he has also, by his choice of name, implicitly identified himself with the great 19th-century Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903), the Pope of Rerum Novarum and Aeterni Patris. Our new Pope's opening address from the central loggia of Saint Peter's highlighted his commitment to the tradition of Catholic social teaching so long associated with Pope Leo XIII's response to the industrial revolution. 

Before giving his first Urbi et Orbi Blessing, our new Pope greeted the world with the greeting of the Risen Christ, Peace be with you. Prior to today, it was widely assumed that no one from the U.S. would likely be elected Pope. (His membership in an international religious order and his decades of service in Latin America obviously balance his U.S. origin.) Perhaps, however, in electing a Pope from the U.S., the Cardinals have done the world and especially the U.S. an unexpected service in offering an alternative image of American leadership. In Leo XIV, the Church and the world have someone who represents the beyond-borders global character of the Universal Church and its commitment to the poor and the marginalized. That's actually rather basic and in itself somewhat unsurprising, but it is in conspicuous contrast to so many of the values currently associated with the U.S. both domestically and on the world stage. 

Habemus Papam

 

Habemus Papam

The College of Cardinals has elected U.S.-born Augustinian Cardinal Robert Prevost, who has taken the name Pope Leo XIV

V. Let us pray for Leo XIV, our Pope.

R. May the Lord preserve him, and give him life, and make him blessed upon the

earth, and deliver him not up to the will of his enemies.

O God, shepherd and ruler of all the faithful,

look favorably on your servant Leo,

whom you have set at the head of your Church as her shepherd;

grant, we pray, that by word and example

he may be of service to those over whom he presides

so that, together with the flock entrusted to his care,

he may come to everlasting life.

Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,

who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Victory in Europe +80

 

80 years have passed since the original Victory-in-Europe Day celebrated Germany's "Unconditional Surrender" in 1945. As the actual events increasingly recede from living memory, the importance of remembering and commemorating them has correspondingly increased.

As on previous major anniversaries, London seems to be one of the main celebratory sites. Indeed, the UK seems to have devoted much of the week to commemorations, beginning with a military parade and a flypast over Buckingham Palace on Monday and concluding with a commemorative service in Westminster Abbey at noon London time today. That is fitting, since it is Victory in Europe that is being commemorated. For most of Europe (at least Western Europe) that also meant liberation. 

Symbolically at least, V-E Day also commemorates the beginning of the post-war European order - 80 years of relative peace and unprecedented prosperity in Western Europe. That the relationships and institutions which have historically contributed so much to maintaining that peace and producing that prosperity now seem to be in decline gives this anniversary an otherwise poignant note, as well as one of warning about what the uncertain future may hold.

V-E Day is also an appropriate occasion to remember the so-called "Greatest Generation" - those of my parents' generation (also the John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush generation) that made these 80 years of relative peace and prosperity possible. They were a unique generation, formed in Depression and tried in war, who were in many ways the last typical generation of humanity, before we Baby Boomers came along with our unprecedented experience of security, well-being, and almost unlimited possibilities. (The reality for many individuals was, of course, less unique, but the overall experience of our generation was unique and set the stage for the even less typical experiences of subsequent generations, who have inherited a world which would have been almost unrecognizable prior to V-E Day.)

So, today, we remember the greatest victory inhuman history, that concluded the most calamitous war in human history. We memorialize its many victims, both soldiers and so many more civilians. (Indeed, as Tony Judt memorably wrote in Postwar, in occupied Europe "World War Two was primarily a civilian experience.") And we especially salute the warriors who won the war, that "Greatest Generation," whom JFK in 1961 famously characterized as "a new generation of Americans--born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage--and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world."

Photo: My Father's Map of his Service in Europe from June 8, 1944 through V-E Day, May 8, 1945.

Conclave (NOT the Movie)

 

Later today, the College of Cardinals will walk in solemn procession from the Pauline Chapel of the Apostolic Palace to the Sistine Chapel to begin the conclave that will elect the next successor of Saint Peter. How long it will take for them to do so, how long until we see white smoke rising from the Sistine Chapel's famous chimney, only God knows.

This is the seventh conclave in my lifetime. Most people in the world are younger than I, and most are probably less close followers of Church affairs than I am. For many, therefore, their main image of what happens in a conclave is based on the recent hit movie Conclave, based in turn on the 2016 best selling novel by Robert Harris. I personally enjoyed both the book and the movie - apart from the ridiculous surprise ending. That said, fiction is fiction. The conclave that starts today is the real thing, not a movie or novel. 

The movie is, however, a good primer on the ceremonial side of the conclave, effectively highlighting the extreme seriousness and solemnity of the process. This is, of course, in conspicuous contrast to the increasing unseriousness of almost everything in the secular world nowadays. Serious and solemn indeed is that formula each cardinal recites as he casts his vote: I call as my witness Christ the Lord, who will be my judge, that my vote is given to the one whom I believe should be elected according to God. Solemn and serious too is the setting, the Sistine Chapel facing Michelangelo's fresco of the Last Judgment!

At the same time the movie and book do also highlight the fundamental fact that these are real people making this decision - real people who, in spite of all they have in common as faithful Catholics and Cardinals, do come into the conclave with different different personalities, backgrounds, ideas, and desires, and so may actually disagree.

That is important to remember because, although we invoke the help of the Holy Spirit - and the Cardinals themselves will very explicitly and visibly do so - still it is they, not the Holy Spirit, who will pick the Pope. As Pope Benedict XVI famously observed "there are too many contrary instances of popes the Holy Spirit would obviously have not picked. I would say that the Spirit does not exactly take control of the affair, but rather like a good educator, as it were, leaves us much space, much freedom, without entirely abandoning us. Thus the Spirit's role should be understood in a much more elastic sense, not that he dictates the candidate for whom one must vote. Probably the only assurance he offers is that the thing cannot be totally ruined."

In the end, that is an important assurance. Christ's promise to his apostles, behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age [Matthew 28:20] and to Peter in particular, upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it [Matthew 16:18], remain the assurance we rely upon in this challenging moment of transition.

Photo: White Smoke from the Sistine Chapel announcing the election of Pope Francis, March 13 2013.

Jesus and Peter

Modern pilgrims in Israel can quickly sense the contrast between the dry, dusty desert of Judea, where Jerusalem is, and the relatively lush, green of Galilee, where today’s Gospel story [John 21:1-19] is set. Renewed annually by winter’s life-giving rains, the land around the large lake the Gospel calls the Sea of Tiberias (more commonly called the Sea of Galilee) is at its lushest and greenest in spring. And so, it was to that place at this season of the year, that Peter and six other disciples returned. It had been from those familiar shores that Jesus had originally called them to follow him. Now they’d come home – back to what they knew best. They went fishing. 

But this was to be no normal fishing expedition!

 

There’s a lovely little church on the shore that marks the supposed site of this event. In front of the altar is a rock, traditionally venerated as the stone on which the risen Lord served his disciples a breakfast of bread and fish. Staples of the Galilean diet, bread and fish seem to be staples of the Gospel story itself! Just a short walk away is another church, marking the site where Jesus had (not so long before) fed 5000+ people with five loaves and a few fish. Presumably, the disciples would have well remembered that earlier meal. Surely we should as well, as we also assemble here at the table lovingly set for us by the risen Lord himself. Here, in this church, as surely as on that distant lakeshore, he feeds us with food we would never have gotten on our own. Here too he challenges us, as he challenged Peter, with the question: do you love me?

 

Peter was asked this critical question three times – obviously in reparation, so to speak, for the three times Peter had earlier denied Jesus, his triple profession of love replacing his triple denial. 

 

Following Jesus and Peter as they walk along the shore, listening in on their conversation, we discover that what started out as a fishing story has now turned into a shepherding story.

As apostles, Peter (and his fellow disciples) have been sent by Jesus to cast their nets and draw people into the Church, which will continue the mission of the risen Lord in the world. But, within the Church, Peter is called to be Shepherd. Others will share in shepherding the flock, but Peter is particularly and singularly called to follow Jesus as the Church’s shepherd. Hence, the church that marks the supposed site of this story is called “The Church of the Primacy of Peter.”

 

What an apt image for us to reflect upon today, as the Church ends its nine days of mourning for Pope Francis, and the Cardinals prepare to enter on Wednesday into the conclave that will elect a new chief shepherd for the Church.

 

Proclaiming the primacy of Peter and his successors, the Second Vatican Council declared that, in order that the Bishops “might be one and undivided,” Christ “put Peter at the head of the other apostles, and in him he set up a lasting and visible source and foundation of the unity both of faith and of communion.”

 

In 1782, after the Austrian Emperor Joseph II had suppressed over 500 monasteries as part of the Enlightenment’s assertion of the State’s power over the Church, Pope Pius VI traveled personally to Vienna to try to negotiate with Joseph. The Kaiser (who not only thought there were too many monasteries, but also – at least according to legend – famously told Mozart his music had too many notes) conceded nothing, but the papal visit occasioned an enthusiastic reception by cheering crowds, demonstrating an unexpected depth of popular feeling for the Pope. An analogous occasion of imperial chagrin occurred in 1804, when comparably enthusiastic crowds turned out to greet Pope Pius VII as he made his way to Paris for Napoleon's coronation. Despite despotic political policies that attempted to diminish the power of the Church, a vibrant grass-roots Catholicism demonstrated its popular strength and the people's respect and reverence for the office and person of the Pope. If anything, the Pope's position at the heart of Catholic life may be even more central today.

 

So, whoever appears on the loggia of Saint Peter's as our next Pope, he will stand on a stage of uniquely universal prominence, from which he will be expected to shepherd the Church and advance her mission of following Jesus in a contentious and cacophonous world, which is so often at odds with that mission.

 

Typically, in these gospel stories of the risen Lord’s appearances to his disciples, there is that dramatic moment when Jesus is recognized, as when in the boat the disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord!” But recognizing the risen Christ is not the end of the story. It is but the beginning of a life of following the risen Lord in the community of his Church. So, even before being formally entrusted with his special mission to shepherd the Church, Peter led the way, jumping into the sea and swimming to Jesus ahead of the others, already leading his flock, leading here by example, illustrating what it means, first, to recognize the risen Lord and, then, actually to follow him.

 

Discipleship is a lifelong process. So it was for Peter, as Jesus’ concluding words to him made clear – just as his words also make clear for us that we learn by doing, as Peter did. if we as Church do nothing to bring his risen life anywhere to anyone else right here and now in the basic bread and fish of ordinary life, then well may Jesus have to ask us over and over again, do you love me?

 

For in the end Jesus is also saying to each of us in his or her own way of life, in his or her particular role and vocation in the Church, Pope, priest, or layperson, what he first said to Peter: Follow me!

Homily for the Third Sunday of Easter, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, May 4, 2025.

Neither Conservative nor Liberal

I don't know! That is my standard answer when people ask one another who will be the next pope. Other than the American cardinals (whom, I presume, are not considered serious candidates) I can only recognize a couple of cardinals' faces. There are so many cardinals, whom I know next to nothing about. Not only can I make no predictions, I think all such outsider predictions are pointless. 

This may be somewhat true on the inside as well, even for some of the cardinals themselves.  There are 133 cardinals from 70 different countries who will vote in the conclave. Of these, the 108 appointed by Pope Francis will obviously be doing this for the first time. Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki of Cologne has been quoted as saying that he expects a “longer, more complex conclave” because of the “heterogeneous” make-up of the cardinal electors, the majority of whom have had little chance to get to know one another. So, maybe, the best anyone can really do is try to guess what qualities the cardinals might be looking for in their discernment.

Meanwhile, as the May 7 Conclave approaches, the media (and especially social media) are alive with intense speculations about who might be the next Pope, and, less pointlessly perhaps, about what qualities the Cardinals might be looking for in the next Pope. Most such speculations suffer, however, from secular media's natural drift to variations of the "conservative-liberal" political dichotomy. The obvious problem with that way of formulating the matter is that those primarily political and secular categories can be applied to the Church only in a very partial and inadequate way. The primary preoccupations of the Pope (and, for that matter, the wider Church) are not the same as those of secular political actors, and the categories they use in discernment are different. Popes and bishops routinely respond to issues in ways that sometimes seem "conservative" to a secular mentality, at other times in ways that may seem "liberal" to that same secular mentality. (The USCCB, for example, is widely perceived as "conservative," but on certain issues - like immigration - they are extremely "liberal.") So using those secular political words is a category mistake best avoided, in favor of words and concepts that are more at home in a religious milieux.

One religious word, which we are hearing a lot these days as a possible priority for a potential pope, is unity. We pray for unity every day at Mass, but what exactly does it mean to want the next Pope to be a unifier? Everyone recognizes that there are factions within the Church. Most recognize that division and polarization have harmed the Church and have likely limited her effectiveness in today's world. However that may be, while unity is presumably the opposite of division, it can also be contrasted with uniformity. Unity, it is usually claimed, need not mean uniformity and is compatible with the rich diversity to be found in the Church. Indeed, the Church's diversity was on display at the papal funeral, both the Church's ethnic and generational demographic diversity and its ritual and liturgical diversity. 

The liturgy has traditionally been of those aspects of the Church's life which exemplify unity within diversity, where one rule of worship has always been seen as compatible with a diversity of liturgical rites. Until the 20th century, in addition to the diversity of Eastern Rites, even within the Latin Rite there was a diversity of rites (Dominican, Carmelite Carthusian, Milanese, etc.) But this almost universally applauded unity-within-diversity runs up against the contemporary controversy about unity and diversity in terms of the coexistence of ordinary and extraordinary forms of the Roman Rite. Pope Francis' apparent hostility to the small minority of Catholics strongly attached to using the extraordinary form of the Roman Rite has led to some otherwise faithful and devout Catholics feeling persecuted in the wake of Traditiones Custodes. Given the obvious diversity of liturgical styles presently experienced even within the ordinary form of the Roman Rite. it seems less than helpful to treat the extraordinary form of the Roman Rite as uniquely divisive. So some accommodation, a "truce" in the liturgy wars, would possibly be one component of the unity that some cardinals might be looking for when they vote for our next Pope. A Church not endlessly at war with herself about liturgy would be a Church with much more energy to devote to her mission 

Unity is also obviously desirable in doctrine. While Francis did not actually alter any fundamental doctrine, some have complained - quite loudly in some instances - about what they perceive as confusion and lack of clarity in some papal teaching, primarily in matters of morality. These may be code words for hostility to some of Pope Francis' pastoral initiatives, his outreach to groups which have hitherto been - or at least have felt themselves to have been - marginalized in the Church. Pope Francis' personal informality and inclusive personal style were an important part of his appeal both inside the Church and among many outside the Church. It is reasonable to suppose that the cardinals would want someone who can continue to appeal to the world as widely as Francis did (even if some may also want a Pope who will speak somewhat more formally and precisely on matters which touch on doctrine). Obviously the Pope is a pastor, and it is evident that the world wants him to act as a pastor, but the pronouncements of a pope (however informally or casually uttered) carry a greater degree of presumptive doctrinal weight in the wider world than those of an ordinary pastor. Stylistically, in the last 60 years, the Church has had more formal popes (e.g., Paul VI and Benedict XVI) and more informal popes (e.g., John Paul II and Francis). While the informal popes have both been far more popular with both Catholics and non-Catholics, a greater appreciation of formality in papal style cannot be ruled out as something some cardinals may desire to vote for.

The Pope is also an Administrator of a complex of institutions, including the Roman curia and the Vatican city-state, which, as is well known, are currently running deficits. Financial management is obviously not the only or even primary quality sought in a pope, but it is an important administrative value that can only take root if supported from the top. So being ready and willing to permit and support some structural and institutional and cultural reform in the running of things in the Vatican may well also be something some cardinals may want to vote for.

On the other hand, one of the key points made by then-Cardinal Bergoglio in the 2013 pre-conclave congregations was the need for the Church to go beyond herself to evangelize. The future Pope Francis famously said: "When the church does not go out of herself to evangelize, she becomes self-referential and therefore falls ill (cf. the woman bent over herself in the Gospel). The evils which, over time, arise in ecclesial institutions have their root in this self-referentiality, which is a kind of theological narcissism."  That sentiment, which may have helped elected Francis 12 years ago, remains as relevant today.

Francis was a lifelong beneficiary of Jesuit formation and its intense Ignatian spirituality. Whatever his other qualities, whoever emerges on the loggia at the end of the conclave will need to be a person who is deeply grounded spiritually, who is alive to God's presence in our contemporary situation and alert to how to share that awareness with the wider world. 

Photo: Cardinal Giovanni Battists Re, the Dean of the College of Cardinals, leads the fifth general congregation meeting of cardinals in the New Synod Hall at the Vatican April 28, 2025. (CNS/Vatican Media).