Happy Halloween

“A pity – I miss all the Vigils. Why on earth were they suddenly suppressed?” wrote Thomas Merton in his journal on December 7, 1959. One of Merton's lost vigils was today's Vigil of All Saints, one of the many casualties of the rigid, liturgical ideology that disparaged vigils and inspired much of the Catholic calendar reform of the mid-20th century.

In its secularized form, however, as Halloween, this vigil has not only survived. it has thrived! Halloween is now the second-largest commercial holiday in the U.S., second only to Christmas - thanks to increased consumer spending on costumes, candy, and decorations. (Americans spent  over $11 billion on Halloween in 2024!)

When I was a young "trick-or-treater" back in the 1950s Bronx, Halloween was largely a children's holiday - a mildly transgressive opportunity for kids to dress in costume and extort candy and coins from their neighbors (and even from perfect strangers). Adults did have Halloween parties. Even my parents hosted one once. But "trick-or-treating" was for children. That some adults also now "trick or treat" seems to me to be bizarre, although in a society in which adults have now for decades imitated their kids in how they dress on a daily basis, perhaps it is not so bizarre that they should imitate kids in costume on Halloween as well!

Actually, what I think has happened is that our generation enjoyed Halloween so much as kids that many find it hard to give it up as adults. As such it is now a more extravagant and expensive version of the somewhat silly children's holiday we celebrated decades ago - all about festivity and fun, with only a residual recollection of traditionally transgressive behavior and the frightening imaginings it evoked.  Halloween's haunting, frightening spirit has been safely tamed for this era of "safe spaces." (Compare the witches in today's Wicked with last century's Wizard of Oz.)

 

In the fairy tales with which we in my generation grew up, however, while the ending was usually a "happily-ever-after" one, the route to that happy ending was strewn with wicked witches and other formidably frightening forces. I remember as a child thinking how lucky I was to live in the present, rather than once-upon-a-time when all those wicked witches and dragons and monsters were a regular threat. Of course, as I eventually learned, the witches and monsters were not literally real. But what they represented, the real evils lurking in the world for so much of human history, tormenting human beings and frustrating human hopes, were very real indeed - and still are. 

 

Christianity claimed to have overcome the demonic powers through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, and so started the process of disenchanting our experience of nature, which we increasingly aspired to control and tame to meet our increasing needs. Paradoxically now, nature has been transformed by our efforts to tame it, into an even more threatening apocalyptic monster in the form of humanly caused climate change.

What we now call Halloween (a name which itself reflects its Christian character as the Vigil of All Saints) was originally an ancient pagan festival occurring at a major seasonal turning point in the year, the transition from summer to winter and from one year to the next. Originally a night of fear in the face of the forces of evil, it was incorporated into the Christian calendar late in the first millennium when All Saints Day was moved to November 1. In moving the feast of All Saints to November - from the original May 13 anniversary of the 609 Dedication of the Roman Pantheon as a Christian Church Sancta Maria ad Martyres - the medieval Church was symbolically celebrating Christ's triumph over the demonic elements traditionally associated with the pagan festival we now call Halloween. In effect, this ritualized the triumph of Christianity over older pre-Christian European paganism by celebrating the triumph of God's grace (exemplified in the experience of the saints) over sin and Satan. If Halloween is now an $11 billion-plus extravaganza that now largely overshadows All Saints, perhaps that sadly symbolizes the cultural resurgence of a new post-Christian paganism over a Christian faith increasingly being consigned to society's margins. Dangerously, the Christian concept of Halloween as the celebration of God's triumph over evil has been increasingly replaced by a resurgent paganism, in which the demonic is celebrated as benevolent and even fun!

Fun it most certainly is not, as the consequences of our secularizing disenchantment increasingly extort their toll upon our world and on our relationships with one another and with that world. Most of us no longer fear literal ghosts. Yet everywhere we are haunted by evil spirits of our own creation, traditional human calamities like war and inequality and novel contemporary ones like social media and climate change, which are all coming back to haunt us.

 

We are haunted by demagogues and zombie ideologies that block us from understanding (let alone responding to) contemporary challenges. Way worse, however, we are haunted by our mutual hatreds and a kind of cultural civil war, which the worst among us have for decades now been encouraging us to fight. We are haunted by our divisions, which have weakened us, have separated us from one another, and have paralyzed the collective action called for if we are to face the witches and monsters of our day.

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Covid Politics

 

Most. of us can probably remember dumb things we did during the 2020 covid pandemic. I can remember leaving the mail on the porch for 24 hours for the sun supposedly to kill the virus! Later, when public Masses resumed, we were required to "sanitize" the pews between Sunday Masses. Luckily the musicians took on this task and found a way to do it easily and quickly. Meanwhile, one day I went to the doctor and noticed that nobody seemed to do any thing like that to the chairs in the waiting room. I asked the doctor about it, and he sad they did it once a day, from which I concluded it obviously didn't need to be done, and this was all covid theater!

All that was bad enough, but was exacerbated by the polarized partisan divide through which all covid-era disputes came to be filtered. Holding on to tribal positions - whether on school closings or mask-wearing or whatever - has inhibited us from reexamining what worked and what didn't during the covid pandemic. The time, however, has come to do so, and perhaps - although given our polarized partisan divide that may be utopian - even to learn something which may be of service next time we face a comparable crisis.

To this end, Princeton political scientists Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee have written In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us (Princeton University Press). This is a politically, as well as scientifically focused book, that is, it concerns itself with what should be done in a democracy.

For me, the big news in the book was the fact that the consensus, prior to 2020, was that non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) were thought to be of at best limited value. All the heroic measures that were implemented in early 2020 represented a rejection of the previous consensus by panicked officials influenced by the behavior of China, which embarked on a policy of trying to completely control the pandemic, something not previously aspired to. As the authors put it, "an authoritarian Chines government went to war with Covid, and much of the rest of the world followed. Not for the first time, elite institutions failed us." 

The draconian and restrictive policies adopted in so many places also suffered from ambiguity as to their goal. At the outset, the goal was often seen as temporary, to slow the spread of the disease, to "flatten the curve." Gradually, however, experts sought somehow to minimize the effects long-term which required keeping restrictions in place much longer. "The zero-Covid frame locked policymakers into costly, futile policies with no exit strategy."

There were actually two intersecting issues. The first was whether the various measures proposed and even mandated were actually effective, the case for which seems less than completely convincing. The second, however, is how decisions were made and what constituencies' interests were not insufficiently considered. As is now widely recognized, school closures did enormous harm to children, especially those least advantaged to begin with. And, in general, the policies adopted, while perhaps serving the interests of those the authors call "the laptop class," did not serve the interests of the disadvantaged classes who were the majority of essential workers. "A fundamental error of Covid policy  was to accord too much power to public health experts with a predictably narrow set of professional concerns and expertise, as well as perspectives shaped by comfortable, upper-middle-class material conditions."

"The central message of this book is that several tenets of basic rationality evaporated under the stress of the Covid onslaught. One of the greatest failures, as we have shown, was to weigh the expected coasts of policy against the expected benefits." Over and over again, we are reminded that the public-health mindset tended to consider only one narrow set of costs and benefits. Others needed to be more involved in policymaking to balance that single-minded preoccupation with other economic and social and psychological considerations. The authors are also rightly concerned "about the quality of democratic deliberation involved" and the way policy making "seems to have been driven by a profound form of short-term bias."

The great success story of the pandemic was, of course, the rapid development of a vaccine. "Vaccination rates strongly predict variation in states' covid mortality. Across the period after vaccines were available, states diverged in their outcomes, with the more highly vaccinated (more Democratic) stats suffering less disease than the less vaccinated (more Republican) states. Although vaccine uptake appears to make a big difference for states' Covid outcomes, variation in states' use of non pharmaceutical interventions before vaccines were available does not."

As for those other interventions, the negative effects of school closures were perhaps the worst. At the more individual level, we can all remember the battles over masking. Even then - indeed right from the beginning - there were questions and doubts about the efficacy of mass masking. Yet masks were mandated , and as a pastor i had to enforce that mandate. I had not objection to doing so, but that probably reflected my political allegiances as much as anything else! As with the theatrical sanitizing of seats, perhaps mask-wearing was a comfort, which enabled us to think we were doing something to protect ourselves and each other and thus made us more courageous about doing our work and engaging in other activities. 

As students of American politics, the authors note the unique aspect of federalism. They show how different states adopted different policies, and that politicians on both sides benefited. "If there is any positive spin on the U.S. response to the pandemic, it is that federalism ensured that most Americans seemingly got the policies they wanted, no matter what those policies were (and notwithstanding the lack of evidence to suggest they worked as intended.)

Covid highlighted the contentious issue of expertise in politics. "What is the proper role for experts in a democracy? Is democracy itself antithetical, as. many have argued since antiquity, to government on the basis of adequate expertise? Or can modern representative and constitutional government somehow allow for rule by the many that also draws on the expertise of the few?"

American society was already politically polarized before the pandemic, with "deep cleavages along party lines and a degraded and polarized media environment." Covid, far from uniting society in a common effort and promoting solidarity, just made polarization worse. "We need greater humility and tolerance of disagreement and more honest communication of uncertainty from public health and other experts. We need greater respect for reasonable dissent, especially when it comes from those on the other side of the political spectrum." 

Covid also "shone a harsh light on persistent inequalities in American society" which may have "had much more detrimental effects on pandemic outcomes than any differences in how non-pharmaceutical interventions were employed or enforced."

Neither polarization nor inequality were created by Covid, but their tragic toll and the renewed conflicts to address them may be the lasting legacy of that traumatic experience.

30 Years

 

The Gospel we just heard [Luke 10:1-9] is, by design, the one proclaimed at my ordination in Toronto, Canada, 30 years ago tomorrow. It was also read, five years ago, at my 25th anniversary Mass, at Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN. That was the year of covid. So, my “Silver Jubilee” was a somewhat muted affair. Not completely muted! The Knoxville Symphony’s First Violinist and his wife played. Our cantor brought her professional choral group to sing Mozart’s Laudate Dominum and Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli. But it was otherwise a modest celebration - just the Knoxville house and a few parishioners. Bishop Stika also attended, which I greatly appreciated. Five years later, we assemble today in this very different setting for another even more modest anniversary commemoration.

Now, despite the Lord’s command in the Gospel, I must confess that I have not, to my knowledge, healed any sick these 30 years. But I do hope at least to have been better about fulfilling the rest of the Lord’s command: whenever you enter a city say, “The kingdom of God has come near.” Our world is now very different from 30 years ago, but it remains a world which very much needs to hear that the Kingdom of God is near - and how to find the right road to reach it.

Often enough, I have felt more like Thomas Merton when he prayed; “I have no idea where I am going [and] do not see the road ahead of me.” But, now so many years down that road, I feel closer to Saint Paul, writing to his friends in Philippi: straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus [Philippians 3:8-14].

Like the seed in the parable, I have thrived in the rich soil of the Church, in which God’s grace and mercy have taken root and produced fruit. Like the seed in the parable, I may have been scattered all over the place. But God never gives up, because that is who God is. God never gives up on the commitment he has made to each of us.

In the 15th century, Nicholas of Cusa, whom I once dressed up as at a grad students’ Halloween party in the mid-1970s, prayed this prayer:

Thank you, Jesus, for bringing me this far.                                                                                          In your light I see the light of my life.                                                                                               You persuade us to trust in our heavenly Father.                                                                          You command us to love one another.                                                                                           What is easier?

Well, sometimes certainly it doesn’t seem so easy, does it? So often, the Good News that the Kingdom of God is at hand can come across as no news at all, or, even bad news, or maybe as good news learned once upon a time but long since forgotten. That is why the world so desperately needs the Church to show the world what Good News the Kingdom of God really is, Good News that is actually at hand for anyone and everyone.

I knew that much 30 years ago, although I could not know that I would make it to this day or what path might take me here - an amazingly grace-filled path, punctuated by daily Masses, Sunday Masses, school Masses, Spanish Masses, Italian Masses, Wedding Masses, Funeral Masses, an amazingly grace-filled path from Toronto to New York, to Knoxville,  now back to New York: singing Christmas carols on Bloor Street and blessing Saint Anthony’s Bread, living through the soul-searing sadness of 9/11 and the welcome comfort of weekly breakfasts with parishioners at the Flame, the spiritual uplift of pilgrimages to famous shrines and a summer spent studying at Windsor Castle, the challenge of walking for miles in the pre-dawn dark at World Youth Day in Cologne, and the adventures of saint-school in Rome, then pastor of Knoxville’s historic and beautiful first parish church, and the amazing adventure of chairing meetings, paying bills, replacing a boiler, restoring the church ceiling and climbing the scaffolding to touch a century-old ceiling painting, blogging, e-mailing, and eventually even live-streaming, teaching and learning, preaching, praying with the sick, baptizing babies, burying the dead, caring for a cemetery, now doing some of the same but on a much smaller scale as superior of this wonderful community – all the time being challenged and stretched in ways I had hardly ever expected.

And I still cannot heal the sick.

But I am at least still able to witness how God has revealed himself to us in Jesus our Lord who brings us together in his Church, through which we may have hope that the Kingdom of God really is at hand to heal our broken world - that God’s power is greater than the forces that dominate our world, and so can overcome all the obstacles and worries which, if we let them, will threaten to separate us from God and from the salvation he intends for us.

So, yes, thank you, Lord, for bringing me this far.

And, thank you, all of you, for making this journey with me.

So now may all of us together continue to help one another on our ongoing journey into the Kingdom of God, where the news is always good and true for all.

Homily for my 30th Anniversary Mass, Paulist Mother House Chapel, October 27, 2025.

 

Praying Together

For perhaps the first time ever, certainly the first time since the tragedy of the Reformation, Pope Leo XIV and a British sovereign, King Charles III, accompanied by Queen Camilla and assisted by the Anglican Archbishop of York, prayed together in an ecumenical service of Midday Prayer in the Vatican's Sistine Chapel. (As Prince of Wales, King Charles met with previous popes, as did his mother Queen Elizabeth II, but this was the first time the Pope and a British monarch had formally prayed together.) The event crowned decades of ecumenical dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion, of whose oldest branch, the Church of England, King Charles is the "Supreme Governor." For the King, this visit comes as the culmination of a lifelong personal commitment to ecumenical and interreligious relations and dialogue.

The King also visited the Basilica of Saint Paul's Outside the Walls, where he was formally installed as the Basilica's "Royal Confrater," highlighting the historical link between the Basilica and the pre-Reformation English monarchy, when Anglo-Saxon kings contributed to the maintenance of the tomb of Saint Paul. Indeed, the symbol of the English chivalric Order of the Garter is still included in the Baslica's Coat of Arms.

Reciprocally, Pope Leo will become "Papal Confrater" of Saint George's Chapel, Windsor, which presumably he may visit if ever the Pope makes an official visit to the United Kingdom. His predecessor Pope Benedict XVI visited the UK in 2010, when he beatified John Cardinal Newman, whose subsequent canonization in Rome in 2019 was attended by Charles, then the Prince of Wales. (Pope Leo plans to proclaim Saint John Newman a Doctor of the Church on November 1.)

Despite the external resemblances - the Anglican Churches have a hierarchical, bishop-centered structure and a ritual form which preserves much of medieval English liturgical practice - the Catholic Church and Anglican Churches are divided by very serious questions about the validity of Anglican orders (thanks to changes made under Edward VI) and, more recently, the Anglican break with Catholic and orthodox sacramental understanding by ordaining women priests and bishops. Such serious differences remain as long-term obstacles to any kind of complete corporate reunion, but they are no longer overwhelming obstacles to dialogue and common prayer and witness, which represent an important common ecclesial response to the increasing crises of our time.

Photo: Pope Leo XIV with King Charles III and Queen Camilla at the Vatican on Thursday.

Credit...

Chris Jackson/Chris Jackson Collection, via Getty Images

Credit..Chris Jackson/Chris Jackson Collection, via Getty Images

Grace Amid Grief: Task Reconsidered, Task and Mare Compared

The season finale of HBO's Task finally aired Sunday. And what a finale! Any lingering questions about where the series was going, or whether it deserved its critical acclaim, or whether it was equal to Brad Inglesby's previous HBO hit, Mare of Easttown, have all been answered. The title of the series finale, A Still Small Voice, evokes Isaiah 19-11-12, where God speaks to the prophet not in dramatic and powerful manifestations but in "a still small voice" which evokes immediate recognition and reverence.

Like Mare, Task has unfolded over seven episodes, which seems about right for a series this ambitious. Although there were moments earlier on when I wondered whether the series had enough to fill seven episodes, it certainly did in the end. And, despite the many minor (and not so minor) characters, and the tangle of interrelated sub-plots, in the end it was essentially about Tom (Mark Ruffalo), whose journey of faith through private and public tragedy underlies the trajectory of the entire series.

In both Task and Mare, the hero/heroine was a flawed detective struggling to emerge from a deeply tragic personal and familial history (his wife's murder by their adopted son, her son's suicide), having all the while to renegotiate family dynamics with what is left of the family, as well as having to resolve the publicly presenting crime situation. Mare was more like a classical whodunnit in that the crime was not solved until the final episode (although in a way which maximized rather than alleviated the series' sorrows). In contrast, in Task the perpetrators of the primary presenting crimes were immediately identified, although the subsequent need to identify the agent who was leaking information to the Dark Hearts supplied some similar suspense.

Both series, as I wrote earlier, are set in a similar Delaware County "working class" environment of natural beauty, old-fashioned homes, which house struggling, dysfunctional in at times unrelenting bleakness and grief, pulling the audience into a real empathy with many of the complex characters struggling to find a way in their very unfair world. I also noted that, while both series are set in the same gritty, depressing, small-town world, Mare and her world were definitely a bit brighter, their lives seemingly being held together in what was still a genuine local community, however wounded, which provided its members with real mutual support. The relative absence of a comparable quality of community in Task seems to add to the show's intended bleakness. (Mare herself was something of a local hero because of her role on a championship basketball game decades earlier. Tom, although presumably he was not always so self-isolated, seems to have nothing like that in terms of a comparable degree of rootedness in any local community apart from the FBI itself and his occasional interactions with a visiting priest from his past.)

Perhaps that is why, while Mare was set mainly in town, so much of the action in Task occurs in the woods. We get a lot more nature - trees, water (lake, river, quarry), and birds - in Task, which, while highlighting the natural beauty to be found in rural America (even in poor, depressed rural America), also somehow highlights the relative aloneness of the characters, whose community supports seem so few and often forlorn.

Before watching the final episode, i had wondered whether Inglesby would allow any of his characters to experience real final happiness. He does. The need for reconciliation between Tom and his adopted son which has been a leitmotif of the entire series (although often barely visible in some episodes) is addressed in a powerful courtroom scene, which holds out hope for levels of reconciliation - between Tom and his daughters, between Tom and his work, maybe even between Tom and God.

The secondary character whom one could not help but be rooting for, Maeve, also gets a much deserved happy ending. She escapes the violence that has hitherto enveloped her, gets to keep the money her uncle had left for her (thanks to Tom's moral judgment that "wisdom is knowing what to overlook"), and gets to move away and restart her life elsewhere (an even more liberating scene than Mare's daughter's escape to Berkeley).

Then there is Anthony Grasso, in some ways the most morally conflicted character and someone whose final redemption not only leaves the audience feeling better about liking him, but highlights the series' search for salvation. At first Grasso's religious questions seemed secondary, just playing on Tom's previous identity as a priest, but, as we get to appreciate Grasso better, we recognize the centrality of his moral struggle, his own search for absolution, accessible through his heroic efforts of personal final atonement. (It would have been nice to have had more of Grasso and his family earlier, not only to "humanize" him more but also to give greater context to his overall story.)

Through it all, Tom remains a priest (as indeed he does remain in a sacramental and theological sense). While often behaving stupidly (as in rushing into dangerous situations without backup), Tom also often displays a quiet charisma, responding to problematic people and difficult situations in a compassionate priest-like manner. In Mare, a personal religious reconciliation is implied by her presence at Mass in the final episode. There is nothing quite comparable in Task, but there is a clear sense at the end that Tom's struggle has become more peaceful and that he has gotten on track with the next phase of his life.

The Affordability Election

Out of respect for the three candidates, I waited until after Thursday's Mayoral Debate to complete and mail my ballot. Once upon a time, I thought the ideal was for everyone to vote together on the same day - a common civic celebration of our shared citizenship. Then came the ease of early voting, which in Tennessee where I was living at the time I could do at any polling site, thus sparing my back and bad knees from having to walk up and down the hill to vote at my designated downtown voting place. Having broken the link with a community election day, covid and the challenge of getting around NYC made voting by mail the increasingly easy next option. 

In any case, voting has more often than not been tribal. If anything it is infinitely more so now. All of which means that there is little or no reason to wait until Election Day, as if one's voting decision were still in doubt.

That said, this is a very issue-based election. The issue is affordability, which is the current crisis of our city and the moral crisis of our time. Just a year ago, Princeton U. Press published David Lay Williams' The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx. NYC's affordability crisis is a direct consequence of the  politically, morally, and socially disastrous increase in economic inequality that has characterized American life in recent decades.

Thus, in his New York Times review of Jonathan Mahler's Gods of New York, Garth Rik Hallberg concluded with this pointedly contemporary observation: “Mahler’s charting of the fallout of the ’80s boom, or, if you prefer, his demonstration that it was a chimera to begin with, complicates the question of alternatives. And it arrives at just the right moment, as New Yorkers prepare to vote, once again, on whether the benefits of a stratified city outweigh the costs."

Obviously, there are other issues that concern New Yorkers, but this singular substantive moral issue - "whether the benefits of a stratified city outweigh the costs" - is shaping up to be the decisive one in this mayoral election cycle. Hoe New York voters answer that question will send a significant signal to the rest of this country, whose voters have so recently seemed to be aligning themselves with increasing inequality and exclusion.

Thank You!

 I was just a boy back at the time of the last big polio epidemic in the U.S. in the early 1950s.  People then were frightened by a dangerous disease, against which they felt defenseless. When asked what he remembered about those days, Doctor Albert Sabin (the scientist who developed the second polio vaccine) remarked: “the fear! You never lost sight of the human side of what you were doing. You were driven by the knowledge that there was human misery. … Thousands of people were crippled and dying.” No wonder vaccines are among the modern world’s greatest blessings!

When we recall the fear of polio in that not-so-long-ago world without vaccines and in the present whenever some new plague presents itself – think of our own recent experience with the covid pandemic before that vaccine became available – it becomes easy to understand how frightened and threatened ancient peoples felt faced with the mysterious illness they called leprosy. Those afflicted with it were often segregated, according to the Law, outside cities and towns (as was done from 1866 to 1969 in Hawaii). Indeed, we often see sick people as a threat – or at least a source of discomfort – to be avoided by those seen as healthy and normal.

In fact, what the ancients called “leprosy” was often a curable skin condition – hence the Law’s provision of a procedure for examination by the priests, But until one had been examined and certified as cured, the leper was considered impure and unclean. Cut off from normal social life, the lot of the leper was a hard one. Suddenly, into all this misery, moved Jesus [Luke 17:11-19] – for whom the fact that the sick were  treated as aliens in their own land did not detract from their significance in his sight. Indeed, as Pope Leo has just reminded us in his recent Apostolic Exhortation “On Love for the Poor,” from Jesus’ own behavior, “the Church understands that caring for the sick … is an important part of her mission” [Dilexi Te, 49].

All the lepers said was, “Jesus, Master! Have pity on us!” The sick don’t need to say much. They can communicate quite effectively just by who they are. Desperation often makes for hope. Often the only thing a desperate person may have left is hope.

So, when they got the command to go and show themselves to the priests, they went immediately. And, suddenly we are told, they were cleaned. Meanwhile, one of them, realizing what had happened, returned to thank Jesus. Presumably, the other nine continued on to Jerusalem as Jesus had directed. But this 10th leper was a Samaritan. Disease had brought together 10 people who would not normally have associated with each other. Once they had been healed, however, once the barrier that united them by separating them from the society of the healthy had been breached, then the normal social barrier between Samaritans and Jews reappeared – barriers between people which Jesus in his own place and time broke down by his behavior, which we, in our place and time, must likewise challenge.

Perhaps the Samaritan could have found himself a Samaritan priest in Samaria. Maybe he did that anyway when he finally returned home. Once healed, however, something special had happened to him through his experience of Jeses,, something so special it changed his whole outlook on life. He returned, glorifying God in a loud voice, fell at the feet of Jesus, and thanked him. Seeing he had been healed, his world expanded (like that of another famous foreign leper, Naaman, who found new faith and returned to Elisha to give thanks [2 Kings 5:14-17]). The Samaritan recognized not only what had happened but why. And the why was Jesus. Leper no longer, he was still a Samaritan; but he was no longer an outsider in relation to God. And so he responded with faith and thanksgiving.

Gratitude is the first fruit of faith. It’s our response to the God who (as Paul said to Timothy [2 Timothy 2:8-13]) always remains faithful. Giving thanks is what it actually means to live as a Christian. It’s an awareness – made individual and personal in each one’s own experience of God’s particular kindness to one – an awareness that God’s power to save is greater than all the obstacles we put in his way.

And that is why the Eucharist (a word which literally means thanksgiving) stands at the very center of our Christian life. Our thanksgiving finds its center in the Eucharist, because that is where we find Jesus, our one and only healer and savior. Through him, with him, and in him, we give thanks to God the Father for all that he has been for us and done for us. But true gratitude cannot be confined to one hour each week – any more than the Samaritan’s gratitude could authentically end in one single emotional scene.

So, after he had been healed, Naaman, that earlier foreigner, took some of Israel home with him, so that, wherever he went in the world, he would be able to worship the Lord on the Lord’s own land. We are here today, as every Sunday, to celebrate the thanksgiving that stands as the very center of our lives as the Lord’s grateful people. As for Naaman, so for us, the question is: what will we take home from here to continue our thanks – today, tomorrow, and every day?

Homily for the 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, October 12, 2025.

A 20th-Century Hecker

 

Monsignor John J. Burke, CSP (1875-1936) was, among other things, a foundational figure in the establishment of the National Catholic War Council, which eventually became the National Catholic Welfare Conference (the antecedent of today's United States Conference of Catholic Bishops). His story is told, in almost day-by-day detail, in this new biography by historian Douglas J, Slawson, The World and Work of Father John J. Burke: A Mystic in Action (South Bend: St. Augustine's Press, 2025).

This is a long book (almost 700 pages), written in a narrative, chronological form, which may make reading somewhat tiresome, but which captures the enormous amount of detail and sheer work, which characterized Burke's life and ministry. While doing so, however, it also reveals his intense emotional life, his reliance upon and genuine devotion to his friends (mostly women), and an intense spiritual life, deeply devoted to the Catholic Church and inspired by his community's founder, Servant of God Isaac Hecker (1819-1888).

Burke grew up in an Irish immigrant family in New York City, a parishioner of the Paulist Fathers' westside parish. He became a Paulist priest, as did his older brother, Thomas, the Paulists' sixth Superior General (1919-1925). After his early religious formation and ordination in 1899, Burke served as editor of The Catholic World from 1903 to 1922. His actual life as a Paulist gets relatively modest attention in this account, however. Once Burke becomes fully engaged in running the NCWC, the religious community aspect of his life seems to recede.

The same cannot be said for the Paulists' founder, however. The author believes Burke "absorbed Hecker's conviction that only Catholicism satisfied humanity's deepest longings and that it harmonized best with American principles." Like Hecker, Slawson argues, Burke believed "the soul's true end was union with God, which began here on earth with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit," who "uplifted and sanctified human nature's every faculty, directing each toward love of God and neighbor. A Spirit-filled laity would then bring Christ into workshop, marketplace, and office." Slawson seems particularly impressed by and attentive to how Burke seemed to live out Hecker's mystical spirituality of public Catholicism and is very attentive to Burke's strong Church-as-Mystical-Body spirituality, in regard to which he seems to have been especially influenced early on by another great Paulist figure, Joseph McSorley (1874-1963). While Burke's Paulist contemporaries play only a relatively modest role in this account, Hecker looms large and influential.

World War I brought Burke to Washington, DC, and the formation of the NCWC. Slawson's account follows in great detail Burke's increasingly national ministry in service to the U.S. Bishops' Conference, dealing with such varied and complicated matters as Catholic wartime military chaplaincy services, the Knights of Columbus, forming female social workers, lobbying regarding motion pictures and federal involvement in education, the procurement of sacramental wine during prohibition, and the crisis surrounding the suppression and restoration of the NCWC itself. (The latter crisis a casualty of ecclesiastical politics and the machinations of Boston's Cardinal O'Connell.) Weaved through this narrative is Burke's own intense spirituality, highlighted especially in his deep friendships with and personal letters to his female co-workers. 

Through it all, we also get a picture of a workaholic Burke, whose health was rendered increasingly fragile by his overwork. He was periodically forced to take time off for rest and vacation, the only practical remedy early 20th century medicine could prescribe. He was even told by his doctor not to celebrate Mass! Like Hecker before him, he had seemingly hard-to-explain episodes of disablingly poor health. One wonders what contemporary medicine, with its enhanced capacities to address both mental and physical health issues, might have made of this and what it might have been able to accomplish to enhance his personal and professional life.

Some of Burke's activities, like censoring motion pictures, may seem solely of historical interest today. But among Burke's many interests were issues of ongoing salience,  for example, his efforts to mitigate some of the effects of the anti-immigrant legislation of the mid-1920s and later. That was also when the Klan was at its height of influence, requiring principled politicking on the Church's part. "I.t would be a sad and wretched mistake," he warned the Church, "to barter for political advantage her spiritual independence" - advice as relevant now as then.

The 1920s and 1930s also saw Burke becoming increasingly engaged in foreign affairs - especially in Haiti (under U.S. occupation since 1915) and in Mexico, where the conflict between Church and State had completely paralyzed formal religious activity and where the Church's struggle was just to be able to be present and operate publicly. The author's typically detailed account becomes especially interesting in its description of the diplomatic difficulties into which Burke was inserted. "You," said Archbishop Ciccognani, the Apostolic Delegate, to Burke in 1934, "are the soul of this work of solving the Mexican situation in the United States."

On September 21, 1936, Burke was invested as Domestic Prelate, a "Monsignor," at the National Shrine, a rare honor for a member of a religious community. A little over a month later, on October 30, 1936, Burke died suddenly.

"The picture of Burke that emerges," concludes his biographer, " is of a man who lived in and with Christ in his own life. Deeply loyal to the Church, he believed the principles of Catholicism alone held thr answer to national problems, and he sought to impart that truth to his fellow citizens. His vision was broad, and his sense of the Mystical Body of Christ enabled him to view the operations of the Church as a whole and to understand the importance and function of the various members. He blended love of Church with love of country, both of whcih he drew together in the NCWC, the organization he came to symbolize and embody."

"On Love For the Poor"

 

"I share the desire of my beloved predecessor that all Christians come to appreciate the close connection between Christ's love and his summons to care for the poor" [Dilexit Te, 3]. So writes Pope Leo XIV early in his first Apostolic Exhortation, entitled Dilexit Te (cf. Revelation 3:9 - "I have loved you."), which is, in some sense, a sequel to Pope Francis final encyclical Dilexit Nos, on the Sacred Heart. At the end of his pontificate, Pope Francis had been preparing an Apostolic Exhortation on the Church's care for the poor. In continuing Pope Francis' effort, Pope Leo here has happily made that document his own. The Exhortation was signed by Pope Leo on October 4, the feast of Saint Francis, and released today.

In the typical manner of such papal documents, Leo addresses the issue as it is treated in Scripture, especially in the life and ministry of Jesus, and then throughout the history of the Church, through the words and actions of significant saints and other Church figures and institutions.

At the outset, the Pope identifies "the many forms of poverty: the poverty of those who lack material means of subsistence, the poverty of those who are socially marginalized and lack the means to give voice to their dignity and abilities, moral and spiritual poverty, cultural poverty, the poverty of those who find themselves in a condition of personal or social weakness or fragility, the poverty of those who have no rights, no space, no freedom" [DT, 9].

He recognizes  how "Some economic rules have proved effective for growth, but not for integral human development. Wealth had increased but together with inequality" [DT, 13]. Reflecting then on the New Testament testimony, he quotes Pope Francis that God's word's message is "so clear and direct, so simple and eloquent, that no ecclesiastical interpretation has the right to relativize it. The Church's reflection on these texts ought not to obscure or weaken their force, but urge us to accept their exhortations with courage and zeal" [DT, 31].

Examples of the Church's historical luminaries cited include Saint Ignatius of Antioch: "But consider those whoa re of a different opinion with respect to the grace of Christ, which has come to us, how opposed they are to the will of God. They have no regard for love, no care for the widow, or the orphan, or the oppressed, of the bond, or of the free, of the hungry of of the thirsty" [DT, 39].  Himself a son of Saint Augustine, he asserts that "fidelity to Augustine's teaching require snot only the study of his works, but also a readiness to live radically his call to conversion, which necessarily includes the service of charity" [DT, 47]. Perennially relevant is Benedictine monastic hospitality which today "remains a sign of a Church that opens its doors, welcomes without asking and heals without demanding anything in return" [DiT, 55].

Of particular contemporary significance are the Pope's words on migration and migrants. "The history fo migration accompanies the history of the People of God. ... The Church's tradition of working for and with immigrants continues, and today this service is expressed initiatives such as refugee reception centers, border missions and the efforts of Caritas Internationalis and other institutions" [DT 73-75]. He quotes Pope Francis: "migrants and refugees do not only represent a problem to be solved, but are brothers and sisters to be welcomed, respected and loved. They are an occasion that Providence gives to help build a mor ejust osciety, a more perfect democracy, a more united country, a more fraternal world and a more open and evangelical Christian community" [DT, 75].

Recalling the development of contemporary Catholic social teaching, Leo cites Vatican II's Gaudium et Spes, which "forcefully reaffirms the universal destination  earthly goods and the social funciton of property that derives from it" [DT 86].

Finally, following Francis, Leo notes that "Christian movements or groups have arisen which show little or no interest in the common good of society and, in particular, the protection and advancement of its most vulnerable and disadvantaged members. Yet we must never forget that religion, especially the Christian religion, cannot be limited to the private sphere, as if believers had no business making their voice heard with regard to problems affecting civil society and issues of concern to its members" [DT 112].

This Apostolic Exhortation On Love for the Poor is address "To All Christians," to whom he addresses this concluding admonition: "Trough your work, your efforts to change unjust social structures. or your simple, heartfelt gesture of closeness and support, the poor will come to realize that Jesus' words are addressed personally to each of them: 'I have loved you' (Rev 3:9)" [DT, 121].

One Battle After Another (The Movie)

On the afternoon of the eve of an expected government shutdown, I took myself to the movies to see One Battle After Another. Michelle Goldberg of The NY Times has called it the best movie she has seen in years. Her effusive praise seems somewhat exaggerated to me, especially given the film's extremely violent character. On the other hand, her characterization of the film as "A political thriller shot through with absurdist humor," which "has several scenes that might have seemed imaginatively dystopian when they were shot, but now look like news outtakes," does capture an important aspect of the movie's sensibility.

As is so often the case with the action movie genre, this film excessively glamorizes, romanticizes, and (worst of all) routinizes violence and mayhem. In this movie, much of the violence is ostensibly politically motivated - perpetrated both by presumably leftist "revolutionaries" (a group called "French 75") and by anti-immigrant, white supremacists. In this film, each at times as violent and lawless as the other. 

The movie's violent "revolutionaries" evoke memories of actual 1960s and 1970s far-left, Marxist militant, terrorist groups like the Weather Underground, except that their activities are portrayed as more contemporary, particularly their apparent support for threatened immigrants. Despite their violent and illegal activities, we are nonetheless drawn into the family story of one revolutionary couple, Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), and their mixed-race child, Charlene. In the course of their revolutionary crime spree, Perfidia sexually humiliates a military officer, Stephen Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who in turn becomes sexually obsessed with her. When he finally captures Perfidia, she becomes a government witness but then disappears into Mexico. Meanwhile, the revolutionary group is broken, and Pat and Charlene flee under new identities as Bob and Willa Ferguson.

Sixteen years later in what is presumably the present, Willa (Chase Infiniti) is in high school in the "sanctuary city" where she lives with somewhat drugged and dysfunctional father. Meanwhile, Lockjaw gets invited to join a society of white supremacists, the "Christmas Adventurers." To cover up his sexual relationship with Willa's Black mother, Lockjaw hunts for her, and the second half of the film is largely a dramatization of that chase and its spill-over effects for Bob and Willa, the local immigrant community, and others. The movie is well titled. It is basically just one battle after another, after another, after another.

The only really redemptive element in the film is the mutual love and care between Bob and Willa, which causes Bob to go to such extraordinary lengths to save her from Lockjaw.

An important sub-plot is the status and treatment of immigrants. Benicio Del Toro is magnificent as a local martial arts instructor who also operates a network for migrants. The precarious position of immigrants in an increasingly hostile society is one area where this movie become more than a showcase for violence and lawlessness and connects sadly with the news of the day.