Re-Embracing Robigalia

 

The modest, easy-to-have-missed occurrence earlier this week of Earth Day 2026 reminded me of when Earth Day was still new and exciting - and concerns it highlights were likewise new and exciting. I can still remember as a college student attending the first Earth Day celebration in Central Park in 1970, when nearly one million people participated in Earth Day events around the city. Hardly anyone then spoke much about climate change (although my Geology teacher at City College did). For most the focus was on pollution and the progress that was beginning to be made in that area.

But, long before the invention of Earth Day, we had, for centuries, had Rogation Days!

From the reign of Pope Saint Gregory the Great until that of Pope Saint Paul VI, April 25 (which, for some reason, was widely also thought to have been the date on which Saint Peter had first arrived in Rome) was observed in the Roman calendar as one of the four annual Rogation Days. The April 25 celebration was known as the Litanaie majores (the "Greater Litanies"). The other three Rogation Days (the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday before the Ascension) were known as the Litaniae minores (the "Lesser Litanies") and were of ancient Gallican, non-Roman origin. I have previously written here [Cuckoo Day April 25, 2012] about the pre-Christian roots of the "Greater Litanies" in the ancient Roman Robigalia festival, one of ancient Rome's significant spring agricultural commemorations. As I noted then:

 

“Ancient peoples appreciated their dependence on the natural seasons and the harvest. The change in religion redirected the focus of people's prayers to the true Creator God. But that didn't change their dependence on nature or their need for a successful harvest or the value of ritualizing that on traditional days.”

 

I also suggested that, in the light of contemporary environmental degradation and the dangers to human civilization posed by climate change's devastating effects: 

 

“Perhaps a rationalized late 20th-century Roman Liturgy's abandonment of such reminders of our connection - and dependence - on nature wasn't such a smart idea, after all.”

Neither the pre-conciliar liturgical movement nor the Second Vatican Council itself ever explicitly anticipated, let alone contemplated, the abolition of the Rogation Days, prior to their disappearance in Paul VI's 1969 liturgical calendar. There was, admittedly, in certain quarters a view (which one might charitably label "liturgical puritanism") that the Rogation Days were not "in harmony with the spirit of Easter," and there were in fact proposals to eliminate some and transfer others (cf. the 19th meeting of the Pontifical Committee for the Reform of the Sacred Liturgy, April 29, 1952). More modestly, the 1960 rubrical reform of Pope Saint John XXIII, while making no change regarding April 25, made the "Lesser Litanies" optional in private recitation of the Office and gave Local Ordinaries the faulty of transferring them to three other successive days which might seem more suitable locally (General Rubrics, 87, 90). I guess that proved to be the proverbial camel's nose under the proverbial tent!

On the other hand, expressing a deeper spirit and sense of the 20th-century liturgical movement, the esteemed Pius Parsch wrote: "The four Rogation Days have preserved the main elements of this venerable rite [the ancient Roman stational observance], an observance that we should respect and foster. for we should pray both perseveringly and in common, since special efficacy and power is attached to such prayer." 

No less than the calamities of Pope Gregory the Great's time, climate change and its associated environmental and other woes seriously threaten the planet itself, and particularly some of the planet's most vulnerable populations. Furthermore, since I first wrote about this on this site over a decade ago, the U.S. has definitively retreated from even recognizing, let alone responding effectively to, the challenges of climate change and environmental degradation. The case for recovering the sensibility underlying the Rogation Days, for recovering what the Roman liturgy lightly discarded some 57 years ago,  for re-embracing a Christianized Robigalia, is, if anything, even more obvious than it was then!

Reading the Bible as a Nation under God's Judgment

As part of seven straight days of continuous public bible readings from Genesis to Revelation, called "America Reads the Bible," this evening at 6:00 p.m. ET, President Trump will publicly read 2 Chronicles 7:11-22, a passage specifically assigned to him apparently because of its decades-long role as a call to prayer in America. Bunni Pounds, founder and president of Christians Engaged, said that this passage, particularly verse 14, has been central to American prayer life for decades, often invoked during times of national reflection. (Hopefully, President Trump will remember - or be prompted - to say "Second Chronicles," not "Two Chronicles"!)

That particular text reads: If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land. I was not particularly aware that this passage "has been central to American prayer life for decades, often invoked during times of national reflection." It is, however, an obviously appropriate choice.

The ghost of the religion-hating Thomas Jefferson notwithstanding, public prayer has long been a fixture of our civic life in this traditionally religious country. As Jefferson's wiser rival expressed it to the Massachusetts Militia on October 11, 1798: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." This was precisely because of the limited power permitted to government under our constitution. "Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net." Likewise, the mot famous and perceptive 19th-century observer of American politics, the French aristocrat Alexis deTocqueville Tocqueville noted that, while democracy dangerously fosters individualism, American religion balanced this by providing a community of  widely shared moral values and beliefs, which strengthened rather than threatened American democracy.

In its original Old Testament context, 2 Chronicles 7:14 obviously applied to God's covenant with the People of Israel. God promised to hear Israel's prayers, forgive their sins, and heal their land. Simultaneously, however, God articulated certain expectations that his people, on their part, were to fulfill. God challenged them (1) to humble themselves, (2) to pray, (3) to seek God's face, and (4) to turn from their wicked ways.

Originally tied to God's covenant with Israel, both God's promise and his expectations of his people continue for Christians of every time in every place. At his now very famous Prayer Vigil in Saint Peter's Basilica on the very day that peace negotiations began between the U.s. and Iran, Pope Leo warned against the "delusion of omnipotence." The obvious corrective to that delusion is for leaders and their nations to practice what God enjoined for Israel in 2 Chronicles 7:14 - humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways.

it is a fine thing that these words will be publicly read by the President himself. More important, however, is that those who read and those who hear these words internalize them and reflect them in our national life and collective behavior at home and abroad.

Our Politicized Relgious Landscape

 

Continuing the national debate about the present condition and future prospects for American Christianity, that debate has been greatly enriched by Southern Illinois University Professor of Religion and Politics and American Baptist Church Pastor Ryan P. Burge's new book, The Vanishing Church: How the Hollowing Out of Moderate Congregations Is Hurting Democracy, Faith, and Us (Brazos Press, 2026). 

Burge offers a clear portrayal (backed up by lots of social science numbers) of what has happened in and to American religion over the course of the past half century. As the book's subtitle suggests, one of his major claims is that the onetime moderate middle of American Christianity - notably "mainline Protestantism" - has largely disappeared, with all the social costs that entails in terms of decreased exposure to and interaction with people one might be different from or disagree with and reducing eh American religious landscape to increasingly conservative Republican churches and non-religion with little in between.  

The tipping point for Burge seems to have been the 1990s. (That decade increasingly seems to emerge as having been politically and culturally critical. Think of John Ganz, When the Clock Broke). Politics changed decisively with the Newt Gingrich revolution, and that polarizing period also saw the consolidation of the religious right and the official declaration of religious culture war by Pat Buchanan. Combine that with the end of the Cold War, which had importantly been a common conflict against godless communism, and the development of the internet, with its radical reshaping of community and identity.

Burge's social science research highlights how Americans increasingly experience religion as coded conservative, such that those who do not identify with conservative cultural or political positions feel decreasingly at home in religion and more at home with liberal non-religion.  According to Burge, "Americans are increasingly understanding religion in a very clear-cut way: as a tribal marker for politics. Thus, to call oneself a Christian (or even more specifically, an evangelical) is to make a statement about one's political worldview, not really about one's local church or spiritual walk." 

Burge recognizes that "Catholicism has withstood the urge to divide and purify more than any large religious organization in the United States." That said, he doubts the Church can "resist the fragmentation and division that have become so deeply ingrained in American society over the last several years." He notes "that the only reason the Catholic Church has not declined more rapidly is because it has drawn a large number of nonwhite members" at a time when "race is one of the primary cleavages in the American political landscape." 

Hitherto, "white Catholicism was politically heterogeneous." Sunday Mass may have been "the only opportunity that exists for people from diverse backgrounds to meet in a social space on a regular basis. However, with the political sorting happening among white Catholics, this space is transitioning from a place of tremendous diversity to a place that is less and less welcoming to those who find themselves on the left side of the political spectrum."

Meanwhile, Catholic Mass attendance has declined since the 1970s, a trend Catholicism shares with the even more declining mainline Protestant churches.

Back to the larger picture, Burge believes "the average American increasingly understands religion through the lens of tribalism. It's a way to say which political team one plays for, whom they find common cause with, and how they line up during an election season." That said, he examines the persistent debate over whether polarization is primarily an elite phenomenon or has penetrated among more ordinary Americans. He sees a certain disconnect. White evangelicals and Catholics are increasingly moving right; the nonreligious increasingly moving left. Yet, there is data that suggests average Americans tend "to be fairly moderate, nuanced, and pragmatic in how they view some of the most talked about and divisive issues in modern society." At the same time, however, those average Americans are "becoming more and more convinced that they should at least feign support for the most strident voices in their tribe." It appears as if many "listen to the thought leaders of their respective tribes and just can't believe everything they are hearing. However, they do agree that the other side is clearly wrong and deserves to be ridiculed for belonging to a different tribe."

Having presented his disconcerting data, Burge still wants to make the case for traditional, inclusive (what he would call moderate) American religion. "People gathering under one roof to sing together, pray together, and work in common cause to create a better community and a better society will certainly move us closer to the ideals that were set forth by the Founding Fathers of our country. There's nothing simpler and more consequential than people getting up on a Sunday morning, getting dressed, and making their way to a local house of worship. The fate and future of American democracy may be at stake."

Orestes Brownson

 

Orestes Brownson (September 14, 1803 - April 17, 1876), who died 150 years ago today, was perhaps the most intellectually noteworthy lay American Catholic convert of the 19th century. His contemporary (and fellow convert), Paulist Fathers' founder, Servant of God Isaac Hecker (1819-1888) later recalled: “He [Brownson] was the master, I the disciple. God alone knows how much I am indebted to him.” [“Dr. Brownson and Catholicity,” Catholic World, 45 (1887), p. 235.] According to one of Brownson's more recent biographers, Patrick W. Carey, Hecker “was interested in ideas and enjoyed extended discussions with Brownson,” while the older, more intellectual Brownson, although somewhat wary of Hecker’s mystical tendencies, “was drawn to what he criticized in Hecker and knew, instinctively, that Hecker possessed something that he did not.” [Orestes A, Brownson: American Religious Weathervane (Eerdmans,2004), p. 138.] Importantly, Carey highlights how Brownson also “always had an emphasis on the social dimension of Christianity, an emphasis that evolved into his stress upon the church" [p.135].  

Brownson himself recounted his long journey to Catholicism in 1857 in The Convert, which acknowledged how difficult a move it was to become Catholic and how ineffective he considered the Catholic apologetics of the time - "dry, feeble, and unattractive."

Bronson was born and raised in the intense religious atmosphere of the Second Great Awakening. He learned his Bible as a child. He became a Presbyterian, then a Universalist, then a Unitarian, none of which he found fully satisfactory. He was attracted to the 19th-century movements we now remember as "utopian socialism." In the 1830s, he was active in the New York Workingmen's Party, motivated by his "deep sympathy with the poorer and more numerous classes."

When Isaac Hecker first heard him lecture in New York in early 1841, Brownson was a prominent Unitarian minister, journalist, and active social reformer. Later that year, thanks to the initiative of the Hecker brothers, Brownson was back in New York to give more lectures and stayed with them at their home. At the time, besides being an intellectual influence, Brownson also became a personal friend and a help to Isaac and his family as they struggled to come to terms with the increasing intensity of Isaac Hecker's spiritual experience. Although both men moved on to more explicitly religious preoccupations and Brownson's faith in American democracy diminished over time, his early political program never completely lost its salience for Hecker.“The ominous outlook of popular politics at the present moment,” Hecker wrote in 1887, “plainly shows that legislation such as we then proposed, and such as was then within the easy reach of State and national authority, would have forestalled difficulties whose settlement at this day threatens a dangerous disturbance of public order. [“Dr. Brownson and the Workingman’s Party Fifty Years Ago,” Catholic World 45 (1887), pp. 205-208.] 

In the 1840s, Brownson concluded that "progress depends on the objective element of life ... on living in communion with God." In 1844, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church by Boston's Archbishop Fitzpatrick. Brownson's Quarterly Review, which he had founded in 1838, added to his prominence as the best known Catholic convert and apologist of his era, who also enjoyed a large non-Catholic audience.

He remained friends with Hecker for the rest of his life, visiting and corresponding with him, and contributing to Hecker's Catholic World, although theological and editorial disagreements  would eventually cause him to cease writing for the Paulist publication.

Those disagreements were anticipated in Brownson's review of Hecker's second book, Aspirations of Nature. in Brownson's Quarterly Review (October 1857). While praising Hecker and his goal of converting Americans to Catholicism by appealing to "the earnest seeker after truth, who is revolted by the depreciation of reason and. nature by Calvinism," Brownson rejected Hecker's tendency to to treat New England Transcendentalism "as an index of the direction likely to be taken by the American mind." Brownson had a better appreciation of American Protestantism's prospect of renewing and revitalizing itself, producing "more conservative forms of Protestantism." Indeed, Brownson suggested, "the American people are more Evangelical to-day than they were fifteen or twenty years ago." Hecker, Brownson acknowledged, was writing "to the popular mind, in a popular style, and seldom aims at technical precision." He appreciated how Hecker's purpose "led him to dwell on the goods retained after the Fall rather than on those lost by it." That said, however, he faulted Hecker "for not taking sufficient pains to guard his readers against confounding what reason and nature have the power to do with what they actually accomplish." With remarkable prescience, Brownson worried whether, in appealing to "Rationalists or Transcendentalists, we are more likely to be regarded as converting the Church to them, than we are to convert them to the Church." Of particular relevance to the contemporary American situation, Brownson insisted on the empirical fact that there never has been an actual state of pure nature. Hecker's "Earnest Seeker," Brownson observed "has been born and trained in a Christian atmosphere, under direct or indirect Christian influences, for no man absolutely ignorant of revelation and grace could propose his problems in the form he proposes them."

Americans can be converted, Brownson argued, "by addressing that in them which is common to all men, their reason, their heart, and their conscience, not what is peculiar to them, or what is their local or temporary interest or passion." He feared subordinating "the Church to American nationality" and warned that mixing the Church "with a radical party or a conservative party would be to compromise her Catholicity." That last warning, in particular, seems an especially apt one for us all to ponder today.

Photo: Orestes Brownson, Portrait by G.P.A. Healy (1863).

Encountering Augustine in Annaba

President Trump's denunciations notwithstanding, Pope Leo today is in Algeria and has availed himself of this opportunity to visit Annaba, the site of the ancient Roman North African port city of Hippo, once the see of the great Father and Doctor of the Church Saint Augustine (354-430), to whom the Latin Church in general and Pope Leo's religious order in particular are so indebted. Algeria is the first stop in a four-nation African tour. This 10-day trip will also take him to Cameroun, Angola, and Equatorial Guinea, countries with significant Catholic populations.

Algeria is, on the other hand, an overwhelmingly Muslim country; but the Pope's visit there  includes celebrating Mass today in Annaba's 19th-century French colonial Basilica of Saint Augustine, which overlooks the site of ancient Hippo and what are presumed to be the remains of Saint Augustine's actual original basilica. (In 1842, a piece of the relic of Saint Augustine's right arm was brought from Saint Augustine's burial place in Pavia, Italy, and inserted into the arm of a marble statue of Saint Augustine in the modern basilica.) 

By beginning his journey with a day-long visit to the ancient site of Hippo, where Saint Augustine lived in community, preached, and wrote, Pope Leo is highlighting his own debt to Saint Augustine, as an Augustinian friar rooting his papacy in Augustine's vision of the unity of the Church. It will be remembered that on the day of his election last year, Pope Leo described himself as a "son of St. Augustine," and he quoted the ancient North-African saint who famously said, "With you I am a Christian, and for you I am a bishop." The Pope's Augustinianism is evident with his frequently quoting of Augustine in his addresses.

Saint Augustine also wrote a Rule, which has historically been adopted and adapted as a basis for the common life of many Catholic religious communities. Augustine had created his first quasi-religious community in his hometown of Tagaste (Souk Ahras, Algeria) in 388, only a year after his baptism. He did the same in Hippo in 391 after his relocation there as a presbyter, and then a few years later, after being ordained bishop, he set up a similar community for fellow clergy in his house. There, around 397, he wrote the Rule that bears his name. The text, reflecting some of the earliest experiences of cenobitic religious life in the Latin Church, is relatively short, biblically based, and inspired by Luke's image of the Jerusalem community in Acts. Its first precept, therefore is live together in harmony, being of one mind and one heart on the way to God (cf. Psalm 68:7; Acts 4:32). The Rule emphasizes a simple and common life. The simpler a way of life, the better it is suited to servants of God. And the degree to which you are concerned for the interests of the community rather than for your own, is the criterion by which you can judge how much progress you have made.

Augustine is rightly known as the Doctor gratiae ("Doctor of Grace"), because of his emphasis on our fundamental need for God's gratuitous grace - in opposition to the heresy of Pelagius. He could also be called a Doctor of Unity because of his tireless advocacy of the unity of the Church (and the objectivity of the sacraments) against the schismatic African Donatist church. This aspect of Augustine's pastoral ministry particularly resonates with the challenges facing this Augustinian Pope in today's politically polarized and fractured Church and world, in which the Gospel is increasingly overshadowed and disfigured by partisan identifications.

We entreat you, brothers, Augustine implores us as he did his contemporaries, as earnestly as we are able, to have charity, not only for one another, but also for those who are outside the Church. Of these some are still pagans, who have not yet made an act of faith in Christ. Others are separated, insofar as they are joined with us in professing faith in Christ, our head, but are yet divided from the unity of his body. My friends, we must grieve over these as over our brothers; and they will only cease to be so when they no longer say our Father. (Commentary on Psalm 32, 29).

Celebrating a Votive Mass of Saint Augustine in the Augustinian Basilica at Annaba today, preaching in French on Acts' account of the Jerusalem apostolic community and the Gospel's story of Nicodemus, the Pope said: "We can be born anew from above by the grace of God. We should do so then according to his loving will which desires to renew humanity by calling us to a communion of life that begins with faith." We quoted Saint Augustines's famous prayer, Give what you command, Lord, and command what you will, to highlight how Christ gives us the strength to renew our lives completely, no matter how weighed down we are. Referencing the Jerusalem apostolic community, he spoke of "the lifestyle that characterizes humanity when it has been renewed by the Holy Spirit." Recalling that there, "Saint Augustine loved his flock fervently seeking the truth and serving Christ with ardent faith," he invited his hearers today to "be heirs to this tradition."

Photo: Annaba's Basilica of Saint Augustine viewed from the ruins of Hippo.

Quotations from Augustine's Rule are from The Rule of Saint Augustine, tr. Raymond Canning, OSA (Doubleday Image, 1986).

Peace Be With You

 

Today’s annually repeated gospel [John 20:19-31] captures the novelty and uniqueness of the resurrection in its account of the disciples’ two encounters (one week apart) with the Risen Christ. No one witnessed Jesus’ actual resurrection. What was witnessed initially was just an empty tomb – an important condition for the resurrection to be believed, but insufficient evidence in itself. Something more had to happen, and something more did happen – in the form of a series of encounters in which the Risen Lord demonstrated to his disciples that he was the same Jesus who had lived and died (hence the wounds in his hands and side), now alive again in a unexpectedly new and wonderful way (hence his presence among them, although the doors were locked.)

 

Fearful for their safety, the disciples had hidden behind locked doors. Perhaps, this was the same “upper room” where they had so recently eaten the Last Supper and where they would gather again after the ascension to await the coming of the Holy Spirit. If so, how appropriate! Since apostolic times (long before the invention of the modern weekend), Sunday, the first day of the week, has been the special day, the irreplaceably privileged day, when Christians assemble in their churches to encounter Christ, the Risen Lord, present through the power of his Holy Spirit in the sacramental celebration of the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist.

 

On that first day of the week, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said, “Peace be with you.” How we long to hear those words today in a world again at war. Not for nothing have the Church's bishops for centuries used these words of Jesus as an official greeting. Not for nothing did Pope Leo make those his first public words to the world on the day of his election almost a year ago. Surely, that was no mere wish on his part! Christ, the Risen Lord offers us his peace - not just some transient social or political peace, however, but the peace that conquers fear. It is clear enough from the locked doors just how fearful the disciples must have been.

 

Many of us in fact spend much of our lives behind locked doors – literally so in our modern urban way of life - a sensible practice perhaps, but one obviously rooted in fear.

 

There are also the many locked doors one doesn’t see, but which one feels, nonetheless. We may not all be afraid of exactly the same things the disciples were, but our fears are no less real, wounding us in all sorts of ways, wounds we carry within us, concealing them as best we can.

 

Yet, when Jesus came to his disciples that first day of the week, far from concealing, he showed them his hands and his side – and the disciples rejoiced. As the absent Thomas acutely appreciated, Jesus’ wounded hands and side reveal the continuity between the Jesus they had known and loved, who really and truly died on the cross, and the now-living Risen Christ, who commissions his Church to heal the world’s wounds and impart his forgiveness in the sacraments of his Church: “Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them.”

 

For the resurrection was not just some nice thing that happened to Jesus - and then leaves the rest of us and everything else in the world completely unchanged. It was – and is – the foundation of what the first letter of Peter, from which we just heard [1 Peter 1:3-9], calls an imperishable, undefiled, and unfading future inheritance to which, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, we already have access here and now in the present.

 

Like Thomas, none of us were there on that first day of the week, but we are here today - on this first day of this week. The first day of the week, the day on which God began the work of creation, has become our day of re-creation, the beginning not just of another week but of a whole new way of life, pointing us forward to the fullness of that new creation in which, living for ever with the Risen Christ, we will finally become most fully human.

Homily for the Second Sunday of Easter, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, April 12, 2026.

No Ordinary Fishing Trip

 

Modern pilgrims in Israel easily sense the contrast between the Judean desert (where Jerusalem is) and the relatively lush, green of Galilee (where today’s Gospel [John 21:1-14] story 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 greenest in spring. 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 trip!

There’s a 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, not so long before, Jesus had fed 5000+ people with five loaves and a few fish. Presumably, the disciples would have remembered that earlier meal. As surely we should as well, as we also assemble here at the table lovingly set for us by the risen Lord himself, who feeds us with food we would never have gotten on our own.

Typically, in these stories of the risen Lord’s appearances, while he is certainly the same Jesus the disciples had followed in life and who had died on the Cross, something about him is now different. Hence, the dramatic moment when Jesus is recognized, as when the disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord!” But recognizing the risen Christ is but the beginning of a life lived following the risen Lord. So, even before being formally entrusted with his special mission, Peter leads the way, dressing up for the occasion, jumping into the sea and swimming to Jesus ahead of the others.

As his role requires, Peter here is already leading the Church, leading here by example. His example illustrates for the rest of us what it means, first, to recognize the risen Lord and, then, actually to follow him.

Homily for the Friday within the Octave of Easter, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, April 10, 2026.

American Pope

When Donald Trump was triumphantly returned to the White House on January 20, 2025, he immediately became ex officio the most important, the most powerful, the most prominent American in the world. Then, exactly 11 months ago, on May 8, 2025, somewhat surprisingly and unexpectedly (at least to most people), Robert Cardinal Prevost, a Chicago-born, Augustinian Friar, who had been a missionary priest and bishop in Peru, was elected Pope - instantly blowing up the traditional expectation that no American could or would ever be elected Pope. In 2025, an American-born Pope immediately became ex officio the other most important, the other most powerful, the other most prominent American in the world. What this means - and the hope that Pope Leo XIV's election may bring to the Church and the world in the era of President Trump - is the focus of CNN Vatican correspondent Christopher Lamb's American Hope: What Pope Leo VIV Means for the Church and the World.

Despite the conventional wisdom that no American would be elected Pope, Lamb argues that Trump's re-election caused a recognition that the U.S. role in the world was changing. He claims that Cardinal Prevost was on his own short list of papabili. Even so, when the white smoke appeared so quickly on the second day of the conclave, he assumed the winner was Cardinal Parolin, the Secretary of State, who had been widely seen as the frontrunner. But, when Cardinal Mamberti announced Prevost's name, Lamb's "previous feelings of deflation turned to excitement."

I too had heard Prevost's name mentioned prior to the conclave, but I still assumed that his American nationality would count against him. In fact, that very morning when someone had asked me if I thought there would be a new Pope that day and who it might be, I had answered that the only thing we could predict for certain was that it would not be an American! 

Of course, having been born in the USA is not the only noteworthy aspect of Pope Leo's background and life story. Lamb rightly highlights his membership in (and his leadership of) the Order of Saint Augustine and his missionary service in Peru - both as important aspects of who Leo is and as important considerations which made an American-born pope's election even possible. "He would not be pope were it not for the years he served in Peru, a time which profoundly shaped him and which brought him to the attention of Pope Francis." He was thus the "least American" of the American cardinals. His Augustinian identity, Lamb also argues, wrote "community, contemplative prayer and unity" into his "governing style," while his two terms as the Augustinians' Prior General had given him "insights into the growing churches of Africa and Asia, and experience of leading a complex, international Catholic community."

Lamb is also extremely preoccupied with demonstrating continuity between Pope Francis and Pope Leo - even while acknowledging Leo's "balance and moderation" and his desire to be "an expert listener and community builder," qualities that somewhat differentiate him from his more polarizing predecessor.  The author's emphasis on continuity, even while recognizing the ways in which Leo is temperamentally different from his predecessor, almost seems like a case of protesting too much. Also, given that Leo in certain respects represents the Global South as much as the U.S., Lamb devotes much more space than one would therefore expect to contentious first-world issues (like women's ordination, which Francis himself in continuity with his predecessors had rejected). 

Nonetheless, Leo's Americanness is an important theme of Lamb's analysis. He does not expect Leo to seek deliberate confrontation with Trumpism. "He is measured and careful with his language, and far less provocative than his predecessor." On the other hand, while Francis was easily criticized as someone who "simply did not know enough about the United States," that "cannot be said of an American pope."

Leo's papacy offers an alternative vision to the one emanating from the White House, a vision that is built on unity and spirituality and which is allergic to divisive rhetoric and polarization. Lamb quotes Fordham University's David Gibson: "While Leo's exposition of Catholic teachings will contradict many of Trump's policies and statements, it is Leo's character that stands in contrast to Trump, both as a Christian and as an American. ... This is about two diametrically opposed ways of being in the world."

Lamb contrasts Pope Leo not only with President Trump but also with the most prominent American Catholic layman, Vice President JD Vance, who was received into the Church in 2019 and claims his conversion was influenced by Saint Augustine. "JD Vance takes his faith seriously, and the story of his conversion, which he laid out in The Lamp magazine, reveals someone who has made a sincere engagement with the Catholic faith, and who wrestles with how to apply the teachings of Christianity in his life. Yet in the vice president of the United States, Leo also faces someone whose Catholic faith is tied to a political worldview." Vance is a "post-liberal," who "believes that society is better served by stronger communitarian and social bonds rather than by the autonomy of the individual." Such ideas resonate with some traditional Catholic teaching and in their more extreme form have become increasingly prominent in a revived ideology of Catholic integralism, an alternative which inevitably challenges the post-conciliar Catholic Church's apparent accommodation with liberal democracy.

Meanwhile, in his first Urbi et Orbi Easter Message a few days ago, Pope Leo issued a challenge which it would be hard not to understand. "We are growing accustomed to violence, resigning ourselves to it, and becoming indifferent. Indifferent to the deaths of thousands of people. Indifferent to the repercussions of hatred and division that conflicts sow. Indifferent to the economic and social consequences they produce, which we all feel." One of the most damaging consequences of our current politics is precisely how it has normalized violence, hatred, division, and the economic and social consequences of inequality and bigotry. The Pope's challenge is both perennial and contemporary: "let us abandon every desire for conflict, domination, and power, and implore the Lord to grant his peace to a world ravaged by wars and marked by a hatred and indifference that make us feel powerless in the face of evil." 

Lamb concludes American Hope with his worry about whether Pope Leo's "low-key style, his desire to see all sides of the argument, and his sometimes studious aversion to making news headlines, could be dangerous if it creates a perception of a papacy that has no clear narrative." He contrasts this with President Trump, whose "success is his uncanny ability to shape the narrative" and with Pope Francis, who "within hours of his election established a clear narrative for his papacy." Lamb worries Leo could cede the narrative to outside events as he believes happened with Pope Paul VI. 

There may be something to this argument. In contrast, however, I would suggest that Pope Leo's "low-key style," etc., may be among his great assets. Trump is bold. (So, in different ways, was Pope Francis.) The alternative to such Trumpian norm-shattering boldness that America and the world so desperately needs lies precisely in calm, balance, moderation, intelligent discourse, and - above all - empathy, all of which have already formed the basis for Pope Leo's counter-narrative. Lamb himself hints at this when he suggests that Leo "embodies the very qualities people hold up to be the best of America, at a moment when it's often said that the American President is undermining them."

The DayAfter

 

God raised this Jesus; of this we are all witnesses. So proclaimed Peter in the reading we just heard from the Acts of the Apostles. Every day for the next seven weeks - from Easter to Pentecost - the Church reads from the Acts of the Apostles, Luke's wonderful sequel to his Gospel. It is Luke's artful account of the experience of the very first Christians, the first ones to experience in their own lives the effects of Jesus' resurrection. Acts also recounts the early growth of the Church, as the good news of Jesus' resurrection spread from Jerusalem all the way to Rome.

During the 40 days of Lent, we identified ourselves with our catechumens preparing for baptism, renewing our own experience of conversion to Christ and his Church. Now, during these 50 days of Easter, we identify ourselves with the newly baptized, recalling the experience of the very first Christians, gathered like them into one Church by the power of the Risen Christ present among us.

(You surely noticed the reference in the Opening Prayer to the newly baptized. In ancient Christian Rome, this whole week was especially devoted to them. They wore their new white robes to Mass every day. On Saturday, back at the Lateran Basilica where they had been baptized, they removed and stored their white robes.Then next Sunday, at St. Pancras, they would appear for the first time in ordinary clothes.)

Yesterday, the Gospel reading proclaimed the discovery of an empty tomb. That was an essential but incomplete sign that God had done something new and wonderful in raising Jesus from the dead. The disciples needed to experience more, and so do we, which is why we need to hear this wonderful story of how the disciples were transformed from frightened followers of a dead man into Spirit-filled witnesses of Christ's resurrection.

We read and hear the resurrection’s effects on the disciples in the Gospel accounts of the Risen Lord's appearances and in the preaching witness of Saint Peter and others in the Acts of the Apostles. We rad and hear the resurrection’s effects on the world n people’s responses to the apostles’ amazing story and in how the story has since spread, in the dynamism at the heart of the Church’s existence that has propelled it outward in 2000 years of world-transforming activity.

Finally, the resurrection's effects become evident in us, transformed in mind and changed in heart, by the unique power of this utterly unexpected event, which has glorified (almost beyond recognition) the humanity Jesus shares with each of us, and which has brought us together in a way in which nothing else could have, empowering us (despite all the world's bad news that competes for our daily attention) not so much with new knowledge as with a new hope.  If, as the saying goes, “knowledge is power,” hope - Christian resurrection hope - is even more so!

Homily for Easter Monday, Saint Paul the Apostle Church NY, April 6, 2026.

American Religious Revival???

Holy Week was traditionally when newspapers and magazines tended to highlight religious news coverage. For obvious reasons coverage of religiious news has grown in recent years and has become increasingly year round. Still, Holy Week does tend to bring out some particularly thoughtful pieces. Among them, this year are two that I found especially interesting. Both appeared on the Tuesday of Holy Week (March 31).

In The Atlantic, staff writer Luis Parrales published "The Real Religious 'Renewal' Happening in Gen Z" [https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/03/christian-revival-generation-z/686612/].

Parrales sets the scene by describing a weekly Sunday evening "Young Adults" session at the Dominican Friars' St. Joseph's Church in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. Weekly, some 150 young people, primarily ages 21-35, mostly young professionals attend these discussions, which appear as part of an apparent revival of religious interest among younger Americans. This Easter, according to Parrales, nearly 90 people are set to join the Catholic Church at St. Joseph's, another 70 at Old St. Patrick's Cathedral Basilica nearby, some 50 at Harvard's Catholic Center, about another 50 at Arizona State, 40 at the University of Michigan. Moreover, the numbers of those to be initiated into the Church at Easter seem to be up in many other parishes as well, as is Mass attendance - as is devotional life (e.g., Eucharistic adoration and contemplative forms of prayer like the Rosary). Certainly something is happening.

To counter the obvious optimism that these trends may invite, the author offers some sobering demographics. "Members of Gen Z are less likely than people in other generations to profess belief in God without doubts, for example, according to the 2024 General Social Survey. Gen Zers are also the least likely to attend religious services regularly and the most likely to never attend them. Many weren’t brought up religious, and many of those who were have left the faith. Only 28 percent of adults born in the 2000s to highly religious families remain highly religious, according to Pew. And despite the claim that Gen Z men are leading a resurgence in traditional Christianity, they in fact are simply leaving the Church at a slower rate than women are."

The worst statistic of all: "For every Catholic convert, for example, roughly eight Catholics leave the faith." And classic American revivals like the 18th and 19th century Great Awakenings emerged "in multiple places" and galvanized "a statistically significant portion of the population." On the other hand, "some of history's most consequential periods of religious renewal have been led by particular people in particular places, often not as representatives of a new common culture but as a committed counterculture."

Two things can be true at the same time. Christendom is not coming back - at least not anytime soon. Nor can the Christian cultural hegemony that characterized the U.S. from the Second Great Awakening more or less through the 1950s be expected to revive. On the other hand, the good news is still being preached and increasingly being heard by those disposed to do so. "Most Gen Zers may not have questions about Christianity or faith, but those who do are seeking answers."

The broader cultural question. is the subject of a very different piece by NY Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat, "Can Christianity Be Restored to the Center of American Life?" [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/31/opinion/religion-revival-america.html].

Anyone familiar with Douthat's work will know that the cultural role of religion in American society has long preoccupied him (cf. his earlier book, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics). Douthat's present concern in this article whether "a Christian center can be restored in American life." By that, he means "a set of religious beliefs and institutions that are embraced and respected in the broad middle of the country, cultivate a widely shared interpretation of the American story and operate effectively at the elite level, informing political conduct and intellectual arguments even among nonbelievers."

For Douthat, we once had such a religious center in the institutions of mainline Protestantism, which "went into steep and perhaps terminal decline" between the 1960s and the 1980s. Here he draws on political theorist Joshua Mitchell's argument ("Whither the Reformation in America?) that "the relationship between the Protestant tradition and the American idea" was founded on a "civilizational wager" that modeled modern American society on biblical Israel's "sense of divine mission and a covenantal relationship with God."

Of the possible successors to the old mainline Protestantism, Mitchell regarded evangelicalism "as fundamentally anti-worldly," and Catholicism "and the intellectual conservatism that it has ended up powerfully influencing" as too Old World. A third alternative, "the direct heir of the defunct Protestant establishment" is woke progressivism, which, however is. neither Protestant nor Christian anymore.

Based on Mitchell's generalizations, Douthat argues that to "lead and shape America, a religious tradition would need to be, first, worldly in the sense of relating in a serious way to a complex cultural and political and intellectual landscape where many people do not share its beliefs." Secondly, it would need to believe in an American "national mission and sacred destiny." Thirdly, it would need to be actually Christian.

He agrees that unworldly evangelicalism is insufficient "to form and shape an intellectual elite and to engage politically outside of Manichaean categories." Catholicism's insufficiency "is its still uncertain relationship to the American drama as a whole — not because most Catholics in the United States aren’t patriotic, but because a vision of America as a promised land and almost-chosen people still does not integrate easily with Catholic ideas and categories." (I might add that, as Catholicism become ever more associated with the global South and less with Europe and North America, that "relationship to the American drama as a whole" will likely become, if anything, even more, not less, uncertain.)

As for the third alternative, according to Douthat, "the insufficiency of woke post-Protestantism is that it believes in sin but not in God."

Thus, this Holy Week at least, neither author envisions a recovery of American Christendom. That said, an alternative model of a Great Awakening in an authentic but more modest, more intentional, more diasporic movement of grace can yet be detected among our not quite so secular almost chosen people.

Passover

 

The great Jewish holiday of Passover begins tonight. It was, of course to celebrate the Passover that Jesus and his disciples traveled to Jerusalem. Instead of sacrificing the Passover lamb in the Temple, however, Jesus offered himself as the Lamb of God on the Cross. In place of the Passover supper that he and his disciples never got to celebrate, he left us the eucharistic meal which is the central act of the Church's worship.

Passover possibly pre-dated Exodus as an ancient nomadic, pastoral, spring-time sacrifice, celebrated at the end of Nisan 14, on what would have been the brightest night of the month (the full moon). Roland de Vaux considered the possibility that this was the feast that the Israelites sought permission from Pharaoh to go to celebrate in the desert (cf. Exodus 5:1). That permission famously having been denied by Pharaoh, the ritual with its lamb and blood acquired a new meaning as a night of vigil, to bring them out of the land of Egypt ... a vigil to be kept for the Lord by all the Israelites throughout their generations. (Exodus 12:42). 

By Jesus' time, the sacrificial meal of the Passover festival had effectively been united with the  seven-day agricultural feast of Unleavened Bread (Nisan 15-21), which originally marked the beginning of the barley harvest. The week-long Unleavened Bread festival was long observed as one of Judaism's three great pilgrimage feasts. The combined Passover and Unleavened Bread feast gathered great crowds - including Jesus and his disciples - in Jerusalem. 

According to the Gospel of John (the Gospel that shows the. most knowledge of Jerusalem and Judaism and that has traditionally set the chronological tone for the Triduum), Jesus and his disciples celebrated a pre-Passover meal together ante diem festem (John 13:1). That meal we remember as the Last Supper, which soon became the ritual basis for the Christian Lord's Supper. According to John, Jesus, the Lamb of God, died late on Passover eve, the "Preparation Day," while the Passover lambs were being sacrificed in the Temple. Having identified Jesus' death with the sacrifice of the Paschal Lamb, the New Testament further identifies Jesus with the "first fruits," the sheaf of new grain which was to be ritually waived before the Lord either (interpretations vary) on the day after the first day of the Unleavened Bread or the day after the Sabbath during the feast of Unleavened Bread (Leviticus 23:11). Either way, according to John's chronology, that would have been Sunday, the day Christ the first fruits of those who have died was raised from the dead (1 Corinthians 15:20).

With the Roman destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70, the prescribed ritual sacrifices could no longer be performed - including the Passover sacrifice, which despite its domestic origins had long before become something to be done in Jerusalem. Accordingly, the Passover was transformed into a domestic family meal which could be celebrated anywhere - a ritual retelling of the Exodus story in a symbolic remembrance of the lost sacrificial meal. The Seder ("order") formatted the ritual into a non-sacrificial festive meal, incorporating a shank bone as a symbolic representation of the missing passover lamb. This is the festival meal which Jews throughout the world will celebrate tonight. 

The Passover seder serves as a joyful commemoration of the exodus from Egypt, a permanent recollection of Jewish liberation and the creation of the nation. At this problematic  juncture in our history, however, as anti-semitism increases worldwide on both ends of the political spectrum, it is also a sobering contemporary reminder of the ongoing challenge which that liberation and national creation entail. In every generation let all look on themselves as having personally come forth from Egypt, proclaims the Passover ritual. It was not only our ancestors, blessed be He, that the Holy One redeemed, but us as well did he redeem along with them. … In every generation they stand up against us to destroy us, and the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hand.