God's Gracious Patience

When I was a kid growing up in the Bronx, New York City (sadly noted for its summer heat and humidity) tried to promote itself to tourists with the slogan “New York is a summer festival.” Festival or not, we certainly have had a festive summer, an exciting summer. We had the Knicks. We celebrated our semi-quincentennial – complete with tall ships, fireworks, and a celebrity wedding – and more locally our own Paulist Pilgrimage to Liberty Island in Support of Immigrants. And, of course, we have had the World Cup, which will come to its glorious conclusion later today in the final championship match between Spain and Argentina at the stadium across the Hudson.

 

Meanwhile, here in church this summer, we have been making our way, week-by-week, through Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans, the longest and most studied of all Saint Paul’s letters. Before I had ever formally studied it, however, my first serious personal encounter with the letter to the Romans occurred some 50 years ago, right around the 1976 bicentennial. It was in a Peanuts cartoon, in which Charlie Brown was moaning and groaning in his characteristic way, until finally someone said to him, “Stop sighing,” to which he responded, “It’s scriptural,” and then proceeded to cite Saint Paul’s words from the short passage we just heard today – in the more elegant, more traditional translation, for the Spirit helps us in our weakness, with sighs too deep for words [Romans 8:26].

 

Well, of course, there really is a lot to sigh about. Just listen to the news – or the poisonous brew that is social media. Paul’s words express the problem of the present, that is, the tension between, on the one hand, our obvious weakness and the sense of overwhelming futility that seems to characterize the world, and, on the other, our hope as children of God and joint heirs with Christ. We have, Saint Paul insists, been offered an alternative, already in the present. Hence, his stirring call to a total reorientation of our lives.

Even so, we remain burdened by what we have made of ourselves and our world, in the here and now. Left on our own, we would stay stuck. Paul, however, wants to alert us to something better and brighter than the present but which is already accessible to us now, thanks only to the presence and power of the Holy Spirit acting upon us, filling us, surrounding us, transforming us.

 

Similarly, the parables Jesus proposes in today’s Gospel [Matthew 13:24-43] all illustrate the slow – but inexorable – progress of God’s kingdom, transforming our pathetic present into God’s glorious future. God sows his good seed in the field of the world and patiently waits until the harvest before separating the wheat from the weeds. The weeds are very real and must be recognized and dealt with eventually. But God’s judgment is patient with the world – for our sake. Because, of course, God is not at all like us! As we just heard in the book of Wisdom, God’s mastery over all things makes him judge with clemency. He governs us with much lenience, thus giving us good ground for hope that he would permit our repentance [Wisdom 12:16-18].

 

God is not at all like us! In our frustratingly futile present, we lack patience – with God, with ourselves, with one another, with our world. But, again, God is not like us! Like the yeast which, when mixed with flour, leavens the whole batch, God is patiently filling, surrounding, and transforming our world with the presence and power of his Holy Spirit.

 

As the first fruits of the Spirit, we – the Church, Christ’s witnesses in the world – reflect the Holy Spirit’s leavening presence and power at work.  We are not quite there yet, of course, as the parable of the field so dramatically demonstrates. Wheat and weeds coexist in the Church – as they do in each one of us individually.

 

With the presence and power of the Holy Spirit acting upon us and within us, we are being aided to trust God’s process and make good use of the opportunity God’s patience provides us.

Homily for the 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, July 19, 2026.

The Odyssey (The Movie)

It has been a year since Christopher Nolan's new film version of The Odyssey was first advertised. It has been a long - if ultimately worthwhile - wait. 

I first read Homer's The Odyssey in high school. When I first read its companion epic, The Iliad, I had the striking experience of realizing that I knew much of the story already, because I had read the Classic Comics version of it years earlier as a boy sitting in the barbershop waiting for a haircut! (My mother wasn't a big fan of comics, and most of my childhood comic book reading was while waiting for haircuts at the neighborhood barbershop.) The Odyssey, however, when I first encountered it in high school, was completely new to me, and it seemed so completely unlike any of the heroic comics (e.g., Superman, Batman) I had earlier been accustomed to reading on haircut days.

The Odyssey is the putative sequel to The Iliad, that other great Greek epic set in the "Heroic" bronze age, what is sometimes called the "palace" culture of Mycenaean Greece, which came to an apparently abrupt end early in the 12th-century B.C. Together, The Iliad and The Odyssey are the foundational texts of our civilization and of western literature. Both were originally orally recited poems, dating from the much poorer "Archaic Age" (c. 800 B.C.), which looked back nostalgically to that much more glamorous heroic era, the familiar stories from which were well known to the audiences that listened to their recitation. 

In its 12,000+ lines,The Odyssey tells the story of the resourceful and cunning Greek hero Odysseus' prolonged, danger and adventure-filled journey home to Ithaca from the Greek victory in the Trojan War. As such, it is one of the world's oldest adventure stories, richer in many respects than the contemporary superhero adventure stories that typically clutter our modern movie screens. Indeed, as classicist (and Odyssey translator) Daniel Mendelsohn put it, The ‘Odyssey has "bequeathed to the West entire genres” - from science fiction to romantic comedy.

Odysseus is a "hero" in the ancient sense of someone with extraordinary physical and mental prowess who was successful in war.- not in the modern sense of a morally virtuous figure deserving of admiration and emulation. (Arguably, Nolan's Odysseus is portrayed as an ancient hero gradually turning into - or aspiring to turn into- a modern moralistic version of a hero.) Odysseus' epic journey highlights the uncertain character of life in an ancient world, which was harsh, unpredictable, and subject to the whims of gods who behave as badly as mortals but who possess so much more power. Odysseus was a relatively minor king among the Greek heroes, but he was not only a great warrior but also a "trickster," a clever, cunning and very shrewd schemer, author of the deceptive strategy remembered forever as the "Trojan Horse." 

Odysseus was favored by Athena (the only Olympian who appears personally in Nolan's film), but made a deadly enemy of Poseidon, the god of the sea and father of the Cyclops Polyphemus, whom he had blinded. The Greek gods are terrifying not only in their power but also in amoral arbitrariness toward mortals. (Unlike in The Iliad, where the gods are constantly active and involving themselves in the story, Odysseus is often on his own a lot of the time, which may make his story more relatably modern. On the other hand, whether Nolan's film may take that too far in diminishing the visible presence of gods in the movie may be an argument worth having about the movie's modernistic tendencies.) 

The Odyssey, however, is above all an epic story of longing for home (a Bronze-Age Wizard of Oz story). Odysseus - complex character that he is - does all sorts of things that imperil his eventual return. But, underneath it all, home is where he wants to be, with his long suffering faithful wife, Penelope (who serves as a sort of anti-type to her cousin, Helen, and Helen's sister, Clytemnestra), and the son he hardly knows (who, in his own coming-of-age story, embarks on a journey of his own, which helps fill us in on familiar stories of the Trojan War's aftermath). Along the way, he and his crew encounter some superficially pleasant obstacles like the land of the Lotus Eaters and lots of deadly obstacles like the Cyclops, the Sirens, and Scylla and Charybdis. Even beautiful and powerful minor goddesses (like Circe with whom Odysseus willingly spends a year and Calypso with whom he somewhat less willingly spends seven more years) ultimately cannot compare with his wife, who faithfully awaits his return, skillfully manipulating the suitors who greedily compete to replace her husband, in the process violating the norms of hospitality and highlighting both the familial and the political character of the crisis caused by Odysseus' prolonged absence. Their final reunion is a romantic panegyric to marital love, and also a restoration of proper political order. His homecoming is in every way the opposite of Agamemnon's ill-fated return home, but both share the same overwhelming atmosphere of violent revenge. (For some inexplicable reason, Nolan omits the sex from Odysseus' encounters with Circe and Calypso, which somewhat detracts from Homer's presentation of those episodes. Likewise, he omits Odysseus' name trick with the Cyclops and then his hubristic revelation of his real name, which is what reveals his identity to Poseidon and sets him up for his future troubles.)

Odysseus' complicated and problematic journey also expresses the anxieties that accompany the adventure of sailing on strange seas, something which would certainly have resonated with ancient Greeks sailing the Mediterranean Sea, setting out for far-flung parts of their known world. Odysseus also undertakes the most fearsome journey of all - to the house of Hades, the home of the dead, where the spirit of fallen warriors articulate a very Greek appreciation of the tragedy of human mortality. (Sadly, Nolan's movie version omits some of the most powerful scenes from this encounter - Odysseus' fleeting attempt to embrace his dead mother and his conversation with the dead hero Achilles.)

Christopher Nolan's unsurprisingly very long movie version of the ancient epic effectively captures the extreme expansiveness of this universal adventure story and homecoming tale in modern form, filled with the high-tech special effects that successively make this ancient adventure story a visually extravagant modern summer blockbuster. Nolan's film stars Matt Damon as Odysseus,  Anne Hathaway as his wife, Penelope, and Tom Holland as his son, Telemachus. These are familiar actors, and so their casting creates familiar expectations.

Thus, one expects a Matt Damon Odysseus to be a somewhat relatable everyman, and for the most part so he is. To the extent that this is a story saturated with universal themes - loss, longing for home, marital love, growing up, the ravages of war - that may be a legitimate way to go, one which may make the ancient epic more relatable to modern audiences. But it remains an ancient epic about a mythic ancient hero, about people very different from ourselves, about their gods, and about a pre-Christian culture imbued with a very different psychology and moral sensibility from ours. Some of that may inevitably be lost when Odysseus becomes too relatable. Thus, the translator Daniel Mandelson recently remarked that, while more colloquial translations' styles may be legitimate, he personally prefers a slightly more formal style, highlighting the fact that this was in fact a grand formal poem, filled with ancient emotions and rituals that ought not to be made to seem too familiar. (One thinks of the Jacobean translators of the King James Bible who deliberately used understandable but slightly archaic-sounding Elizabethan English to convey a sense of the special sacrality of their text.). In this regard, perhaps, Nolan's effort would have benefited from more appearances by the gods - not just for authenticity's sake of fidelity to the text but also to remind us that Odysseus and his interlocutors, however universally human we may imagine them, were not exactly people just like us. 

It is perhaps inevitable that a modern audience (or more to the point, perhaps, a modern director) demands a modern sensibility on a modern movie screen. Throughout the film, Nolan's Odysseus is just a tad more modern in his feelings and attitudes and responses to what happens than the ancient Odysseus would have been (or could have been). There is also a strange undercurrent of premonition that the heroic age is ending, that the ancient Mycenaean palace culture is about to be destroyed and give way to a "dark age." Homeric bards who sang this saga obviously knew that, but it is anachronistic in the extreme to attribute such an expectation to the era itself! Presumably, the motivation for this approach is in support of movie's moralizing tendency.

Homer looked back nostalgically to that great age of "Heroes." We judge that age by different standards, some of which inevitably creep into Nolan's portrayal of Odysseus. The epic itself ends on a triumphant note of vengeance and restoration. The movie, however, has a more morally ambivalent ending. Odysseus' gets his vengeance, and Telemachus gets his throne, but Odysseus seems anguished and repentant about his warrior life. He and Penelope, happily reunited, leave Ithaca together for some sort of voluntary expiatory exile. It is certainly a satisfactory ending, but undeniably a modern one.

L.P. Hartley's famous observation, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there," remains relevant. We learn about ourselves from ancient classics - both from what is universal that we share with ancient people, and also from what was very different from us about those same ancient people.

World War II (with Tom Hanks)

 

It requires no special insight to observe that our appetite for World War II stories seems insatiable. That may be a good thing. World War II was, after all, the defining conflict (the "Trojan War," so to speak) of the 20th century, although itself part of a larger "war" which began with World War I in 1914 and ended - sort of - with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991). World War II created the world I grew up in - and more specifically the America I grew up in. It created an international order that lasted more or less for some 80 years. It created the most prosperous period in human history. It offered a focus for national identity and patriotism for second and third generation heirs of immigrants, like my own relatives and a whole generation of postwar political national leaders (including Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Bush I), who fought in that war and learned some of their most fundamental lessons from that experience.

The series spans 20 episodes. They are only loosely chronological, as each episode focuses on a specific aspect of the war (e.g., Italy). This approach allows for added attention to aspects of the war's story that seldom get as much attention in a strictly chronological account, especially accounts which frame the war almost entirely in terms of an American victory story. For example, episode 15 is devoted entirely to the very different ways in which Germany and Japan related to their own citizens on the domestic front. Episode 16 is devoted entirely to the resistance movements in occupied countries, in France (with a largely very successful outcome) and in Poland (with a totally tragic outcome).

With the passage of time and the decline in the quality in American education, it must be assumed that actual knowledge of World War II has diminished and will continue to do so. Hence, the civic value of programs like this that can remedy some of our increasing collective ignorance. We need to remember World War II - how it happened, the colossal mistakes that led up to it, the terrible damage it did as largely a war against civilians, and the leating impact of the Holocaust and other World War II genocidal actions.

Of course it is likely those who already know something about World War II in the first place that will tune in to watch a program like this! That said the History Channel and Tom Hanks are to be commended for this very valuable effort!

World Cup Summer in the Land of More

There is a telling scene in The Americans (the 2013-2018 FX series about two Soviet KGB agents, posing as an American married couple, Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, living in a Virginia suburb of Washington. DC, while spying for the U.S.S.R. and raising their American-born children), in which Elizabeth struggles with Washington's heat, while her husband cones to the rescue by turning on the air-conditioner. Air-conditioning is but one of many benefits of American prosperity that Philip (more than Elizabeth) would come to appreciate during the series. It is but one of many benefits of American prosperity and our consumer-oriented culture that we Americans increasingly just take for granted - like large portions and free refills for drinks in restaurants.

Given the ubiquity of American popular culture abroad, one might have assumed that foreign visitors to America would already know a lot about American life - certainly more than most modern Americans know about life elsewhere. And yet, if media reports are to be believed, for the legions of 21st-century de Tocquevilles experiencing the U.S, for the first time this World Cup summer and posting about it on social media, the many material benefits of American prosperity and our consumer-oriented culture have been something of a revelation - a happy one, apparently.

That many foreign tourists coming to America for the World Cup like what they see and experience here is a good thing. Our country can use all the good press it can get these days!

Before the World Cup began there was some anxiety that tourists and soccer fans would experience "sticker shock" at the price of everything - especially World Cup tickets and train tickets to the New Jersey stadium. If so, that has been more than counterbalanced apparently by the sheer consumerist joy of shopping in American big box stores and eating in American restaurant and fast-food outlets. It is not necessarily the quality of the products being consumed that has been making such an impression. It is the sheer amount of stuff available for purchase and the size of the portions to be consumed.

A friend of mine likes to observe that, in the lottery of life, the luckiest outcome is to be born in the U.S. Never perhaps has that been more true. That is not to deny that there have been other periods, such as the 20 years after World War II, when the material benefits of our living in this country were more equally shared and there was a greater sense of unity, more shared prosperity, and a more commonly shared popular and civic culture. There is much more malaise - material and spiritual - now than there was then. And, for many Americans right now, their material situation is genuinely precarious, despite the wider picture of prosperity.

If tourists stayed long enough they might well pick up on more of that malaise. but the first image of America in every age has always been its abundance - from its amber waves of grain and its purple mountain majesties to its skyscrapers and highways to its supermarkets and department stores.

Of course, living in our air-conditioned comfort and consumerist gluttony, we may ask ourselves whether this is all there is, whether this is all we want to be about. Such concerns have likewise plagued us throughout our history. Religion used to offer answers to such questions. As fewer people respond to religion's answers, fewer may even be able to formulate the right questions. These are real problems, which sensitive souls still struggle with.

When communism collapsed in eastern Europe, there was a brief hope in some quarters that there would be a widespread spiritual revival and renewal of European Christianity. It quickly became clear, however, that prosperity proved more popular than virtue.

So it certainly seems here, this World Cup Summer, living in this abundant land of More.

As Maine Goes

 

For Democrats this midterm election year, retaking majority control of the U.S. Senate has suddenly seemed a real possibility - not yet a probability, but at least a possibility. But any path to Democratic control of the Senate almost certainly has to go through Maine, the only "Blue" state which voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 but which still has a Republican Senator. Susan Collins, Maine's formidable Republican Senator, has served five terms in the U.S. Senate, representing that state since having first been elected in 1996 and regularly reelected in 2002, 2008, 2014, and 2020. There was a time when states routinely voted for presidents from one party and senators from another - and even two senators from different parties. In our present polarized politics, however, when all politics is increasingly nationalized, such situations are increasingly anomalous, and so Susan Collins has become an outlier.

In Graham Platner, Maine's Democrats thought they had found a populist "outsider," who appealed to progressive voters alienated from Collins but also alienated from the Democratic "establishment." Despite considerable personal baggage, Platner easily won the June 9 Democratic party primary. Since then, however, subsequent revelations regarding his alleged personal behavior have cost him his endorsements and financial support, and his campaign has collapsed. 

How did this happen? American politics has long had an affinity for "outsiders." (The most notorious example, perhaps, was Jimmy Carter, who ran as an outsider, never having previously met a Democratic president. Carter won in 1976, but his presidency was a failure, in large part precisely because of his having been such an outsider.)

There is no doubt that many Democrats are alienated from their party's established leadership  - for having lost to Trump in 2024, for their anemic opposition to Trump, for their association with moneyed interests, etc. Hence, the appeal of Platner (an "outsider" who had never been a politician) and other putatively "populist" candidates to the young, college-educated progressives who inhabit the party's left wing. But there is also no doubt that those who promoted Platner's candidacy starting a year ago somehow failed to vet him adequately, which - whether progressives like it or not - is one indispensable task that the traditional establishments do relatively well. There may be some populist wisdom in the widespread distrust of elites, but the gatekeeping function of elites is not to be too casually dismissed either. If, for example, the Republican party's establishment elites had been more powerful, Donald Trump would likely never have gotten his party's nomination. 

The Democratic party establishment is also to blame, however, for the Platner fiasco. Instead of encouraging more plausible candidates to challenge Platner in the party's primary, the Washington-based Democratic party establishment threw its support to the incumbent 78-year old Governor, Janet Mills, whose age alone made her an avatar of the gerontocratic establishment many Democrats, especially young progressive Democrats, rightly or wrongly believe to be increasingly out of touch with their interests. Mills' campaign went nowhere; and so, with no serious opposition, Platner achieved an impressive victory in the primary.

The irony is, of course, that any reasonably good Democratic candidate should in theory be able to win in Maine. All he or she would have to do would be to convince those who voted for Harris in 2024 to vote "blue" again in 2026. There was no real need, therefore, to find an "outsider" to appeal to non-Democratic voters. Platner's oysterman persona and troubled past with PTSD were for some reason expected to appeal to "working-class" voters, who have been culturally alienated from the Democratic party. In fact, however, his support was always strongest among college-educated progressives. Indeed, it seems somewhat condescending if not outright insulting, to so-called "working-class" voters to assume that they would somehow see themselves in Platner's problems or would necessarily want to be represented by someone like him.

Moreover, the more extreme Democratic candidates who have won in primaries against incumbents in New York and elsewhere have almost all won in very safe "blue" seats. The Democratic left's populist insurgency has been almost entirely directed at defeating other Democrats, not at defeating Republicans. In this, it mirrors Trump's apparent prioritizing his internal control over the Republican party more than maintaining Republican control of Congress in the midterm elections. 

That said, Platner's support in Maine was very high. He had energized significant support, which the Maine Democratic party cannot afford to alienate - lest an internal party conflict cause Susan Collins to win and guarantee continued Republican control of the U.S. Senate. A lot will depend on the process the Maine Democrats employ to choose Platner's replacement and whether he or she can retain the support of most Maine Democrats and make the Senate race what it really should be - a referendum on Trump and Susan Collins' empowerment of Trumpism.

Image: Norman Rockwell Paints America at the Polls (November 4, 1944).

Young Washington (The Movie)

 

In theaters just in time for July 4, Young Washington is a new historical drama, released by Angel Studios, about the early life and preliminary military career of our future Revolutionary War commander and then first President of the U.S., George Washington (played by William Franklyn-Miller). It focuses especially on Washington's military experiences in the French and Indian War.

The film highlights the young George Washington's ambition and his frustration at the limitations of his social status in Virginia society and his consequent lack of prospects for advancement in the British army's officer corps because of his colonial origins and lack of English education. It has often been observed that, had Washington received the commission he had originally sought in the British Army, history would likely have been very different. Instead, Washington had to settle for becoming a Colonel in the Virginia militia, in recognition of his heroism in the French and Indian War after the death of General Braddock. The film focuses on his heroism and steadfastness, but also emphasizes his resentment at the British, a resentment which only grows as he experiences repeated slights because of his provincial origin and colonial status.

The film is heavy on battle scenes, which ought to cure anyone watching of any romanticized images of 18th-century warfare! In addition to highlighting his growing military prowess, however, the film portrays young Washington's personal growth, intellectually, morally, and relationally. The important part played by his older half-brother Lawrence (who teaches him that "even a pawn can take a king") in Washington's development is emphasized, as is that of his mother who teaches him to learn from failure rather than repeat it.

The film also illustrates the complexity and moral ambiguity of rival claims in colonial America. Washington's big break becomes possible because of British colonial ambitions in the Ohio territory. His military blunders on the Ohio frontier follow from the competition between the British and the French for the same land. The two great European empires were in constant conflict over territory which, of course, had until then belonged to the native Indian tribes, whose complex relationship with the settler communities is also an important part of the history and well portrayed in the film.

That Washington wanted a commission as a British officer, was denied it, and resented that is beyond question. How long-standing and deep-seated were his other feelings and expressions of colonial identity and assertiveness may be more debatable historically. Young Washington repeatedly refers to the new situation created by America and especially by the frontier (the Ohio Valley) where anyone can become someone. Ironically, Washington's greatest social advance, which is not portrayed in the film (having come after the point at which the movie's story stops) will be his advantageous marriage to a rich widow - an instance of his advancing according to the established norms of society's set patterns.

The British and American victory in the French and Indian War would create the wider world context that would make the American Revolution possible. Alongside that, the film emphasizes Washington's internal war with the stratified structures of the British Empire and his awakening to the fact that his real country was Virginia more than Great Britain, a realization that would also transform colonial American history and help create a new country.

Independence Day

Today, the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, when (as we just prayed in the collect) “our country claimed its place among the family of nations” - an occasion for giving thanks “for what has been achieved” and asking divine help “for the work that still remains.”

On Independence Day, we honor the great legacy left for us, often at great sacrifice, by generations past - indigenous Americans, enslaved Africans, and generations of immigrants, to whom we remain linked in a great social compact, bounded to one another, both past and present, for the sake of the future. We remember our past history as a nation, we celebrate our present life together, and we commit ourselves to hope for our common future.

As Pope Leo has written in his special Letter on the 250^th Anniversary of the Founding of the United States: “This anniversary stands as an invitation not only to celebrate the nation’s remarkable journey, but also to reflect upon the responsibilities that the sons and daughters of this country bear to one another, and to the generations who will inherit the nation that is being shaped today.”

As Americans, we share in the benefits bequeathed to us by our country’s founders, whose legacy we receive with respect and celebrate with gratitude. We are – so many of us - the heirs of countless immigrants, so many of whom came to this country in response to its promises of economic opportunity and political freedom. Catholic immigrants brought our faith to this land and enriched this society with a strong network of Catholic institutions, which have served Americans of all backgrounds, contributing a distinctly Catholic sensibility to the American experiment.

Last Sunday, I told the story of Annie Moore. When 17-year old Annie Moore crossed the threshold of the New World as the first immigrant to pass through the new Ellis Island immigration Facility on January 1, 1892, she was welcomed by, among others, Father Callahan of the Mission of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary, who blessed her and gave her a silver coin, an expression of the historic role of the American Catholic community  in providing hospitality and welcome  to generation after generation of new arrivals, in this land and nation of immigrants.

Earlier this week, many of us honored that tradition and celebrated our nation’s unique heritage with a Pilgrimage to the Statue of Liberty, ending with a reading of Emma Lazarus’ famous poem, which transformed that monument into a global beacon of hope welcoming generations of immigrants to America. To quote again from Pope Leo’s Letter: “In every generation, those who have arrived seeking freedom, opportunity and a place to belong have helped to shape the nation’s character. To receive them with passion and generosity is not only an act of charity, but also a recognition of the dignity that belongs to every human person.”

As we celebrate today with hot dogs, tall ships, Times Square Ball Drops, a celebrity wedding, and, of course, fireworks, we are also aware of the many difficult and divisive issues facing our country, along with the contentious arguments that command the news and dominate social media. In response to the pervasive political polarization of his own time, the founding pastor of this parish, Servant of God, Isaac Hecker hoped that Catholicism could “act like oil on troubled waters” and so “sustain our institutions and enable our young country to realize its great destiny” [Letter, December 22, 1857, The Paulist Vocation, p. 46]. Today, our faith challenges us to make Hecker’s hope a reality in response to the multiple challenges of our time, to address our disagreements in a morally serious way that transcends simplistic sloganeering, emotional appeals to narrowly defined secular or religious identities, and the vilification of political opponents.

As our American bishops reminded us over a decade ago: “Catholics may choose different ways to respond to compelling social problems, but we cannot differ on our moral obligation to help build a more just and peaceful world through morally acceptable means, so that the weak and vulnerable are protected and human rights and dignity are defended.” [USCCB, Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship (2015), 20].

Homily for Independence Day, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, July 4, 2026 (adapted in part from my homily for last Sunday).

Suburbia Triumphant

Growing up, as I was so fortunate to have done, as a baby Boomer in the aftermath of World War II, I was lucky not only to live in the Bronx, still in its glory (although fading faster than any of us then realized) but also to grow up in the glorious sunset of the urban Catholic parish neighborhood. Physically embodied in the great Gothic parish church across the street from where we lived, the parish church was by far the biggest and most impressive structure in the neighborhood and perhaps the most influential in that it served as the spiritual center and source of stability for most of our neighbors. What a sight it was in those days, Sunday after Sunday, as thousands of people poured out of the 13 Sunday Masses celebrated in both upper and lower churches! (Sunday Masses upstairs at 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 12:50 and downstairs at 9, 10:15, 11:15, 12:10, and 12:55.) The “candy store” owner on the ground floor of our building once remarked that they probably made more selling newspapers to the people coming out of church on Sunday than on anything else the rest of the week! As a child, I would attend the parish grade school and go on to the parish high school, the two other great parish institutions, which - along with the omnipresent Augustinian Fathers and Dominican Sisters who staffed them - made the parish plant the physical and psychological (and, of course, spiritual) communal anchor of our very densely populated, urban neighborhood.

Already, however, the pull of suburbanization was at work. My mother, more than the rest of us I think, hoped someday to be a suburban homeowner - a desire eventually fulfilled years later, when I was already away in grad school. By them both the Bronx and the Church were being blown about by in the fierce winds of change. Those changes, however, were themselves, in part at least, consequences of a wider cultural shift from the old urban neighborhoods where European Catholic immigrants and their children and grandchildren had made once made their communities to to new and very different kinds of communities in the suburbs. That is the story, so ably told by Holy Cros priest and historian at Notre Dame University Stephen M Koeth in his book Crabgrass Catholicism: How Suburbanization Transformed Faith and Politics in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 2025).

Koeth contends that "it is only through accounting for the religious lives of suburbanites that we can fully understand the processes of suburbanization and the experience of suburbia." He also argues that Catholic critiques of suburbia "were reflective of concerns over modernity, economic prosperity, consumerism, assimilation, and the decline of ethnic religiosity as much as they were a specific response to suburban living."

The author begins by recalling the urban Catholic world that the 19th- and 20th-century American Church had created up until World War II. His case-study for postwar suburbanization and Catholic institutional expansionism is Long Island, which experienced enormous suburban growth in the postwar period. It was on Long Island in 1957 that the first fully suburban diocese was created - the Diocese of Rockville Center - a situation which also left its mother diocese, Brooklyn, the only entirely urban diocese in the U.S.He surveys the Church's demographic and institutional expansion and thr attempts to transplant older models to this new ministerial setting.

An important contention of this book is that "space shapes religious practice." Because parishes often lacked adequate buildings and the nature of suburban transportation, the center of Catholic practice shifted from the parish plant to the family home, and traditional communal expressions of piety shifted to more domestic expressions. All this led to greater involvement of the laity in the Church's organizational life and mission - not so much as a result of Vatican II but actually in anticipation of it. This was the heyday of the Christian Family Movement, the Cana Conference, and Marriage Encounter.

In the process, the old ethnic divisions began to breakdown, and an ethnically amalgamated Catholic identity came to predominate. (Think of sociologist Will Herberg's famous, Protestant, Catholic, Jew, published in 1955.) At the same time, as white, once "ethnic" Catholics amalgamated, racial division and polarization predominated.

Meanwhile, despite the commendable effort to continue the commitment to parish schools, the sheer size of the population to be educated and financial and other pressures (e.g., high taxes supporting high quality public schools) led to a greater emphasis on religious education programs, often conducted in parishioners' homes. All this had a further effect on participation in post-war politics."Catholic voters ultimately prioritized tax relief and local control over obtaining state aid for parochial schools. Suburban Catholics became increasingly dissatisfied with New Deal liberalism and increasingly opne to conservative political positions.

The early expansion into suburbia coincided with an era of high churchgoing among American Catholics. (Hence, the regular erection of new parishes and constant construction of new churches and parish facilities.) U.S. Catholic Mass attendance peaked at 74% in 1958. By the early 1970s, however, the drop in Mass attendance could no longer be ignored. The author quotes Paulist John B. Sheerin, writing in 1973, regarding the alarm about the drop in Mass attendance then being sounded by Andrew Greeley, that it was "worth of far more concern than most Catholics had given it."

Boomers and their heirs "have ceased practicing their faith in ever-increasing numbers," and "many of the most plausible explanations for the declines are deeply connected to change sin American Catholicism wrought by postwar suburbanization and its attendant social transformations." In addition to the loss of the old urban identification between religion and neighborhood and the various structural and financial issues already alluded to especially in regard to Catholic education, Koeth also acknowledges untoward changes in the U.S. political climate. Many, especially millennials, "have been turned off by what they perceive to be the political agendas of religious leaders.

Thus, "one of the key ironies of this book" is "that even as the postwar move to the suburbs was marked by the optimism and excitement of proliferating parishes and schools and of classrooms, seminaries, and convents bursting at the seams, suburbanization was undermining the structures that had sustained the vibrant Catholic world of the 'immigrant Church.' In opening an entirely new era for the Church, suburbanization sowed seeds that would ultimately erode the vitality fo the Church in the early postwar period." The Church today " is still grappling with, and largely defined by, the challenges first posed by the collapse of the Catholic ghetto and the spread of crabgrass Catholicism."

An America 250 Pilgrimage In Support of Immigrants

 

Yesterday, some 60+ parishioners and others went on pilgrimage to Liberty Island to pray for America on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and to identify with and express support for immigrants, past, present, and future. 

We began with Mass at Our Lady of Victory Church on William Street and a rousing homily by Paulist Father Bruce Nieli, who was inte inspiration behind the event. We then walked to Castle Clinton and the Battery Park Terminal, praying the Rosary along the way, with stops in front of the National Museum of the American Indian and the Saint Elizabeth Seton Shrine. The first decade was prayed in thanksgiving for the immigrants of the past, whose faith and labor built the Church and country we have inherited. The second was for appreciation and justice for Native peoples, that our national celebration be marked by honest memory and deeper reconciliation.. The third decade was for all who serve immigrant families through works of mercy and for the strength of those families to endure. The fourth was for immigrants and asylum seekers presently in transit or waiting, that their dignity be upheld in the in-between. The final decade was for all the future immigrants to our country and that the nation's next 250 years be shaped by welcome rather than fear.

From the Battery, we took the ferry to Liberty Island, where we heard Emma Lazarus' famous poem New Colossus, which transformed the meaning of that monument into a beacon of hope for generations of newcomers to America, and which famously concludes:

"Give me your tired, your poor,                                                                                                  Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,                                                                           The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.                                                                                Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,                                                                            I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Americans All!

Who is an American? Who is a citizen? That question was definitively answered by the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which famously begins: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

Ratified in 1868, this clause was designed to overturn the infamous Dred Scott decision (Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1857), which had excluded African-Americans from U.S. citizenship. Subsequently, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), the Supreme Court affirmed the plain meaning of the amendment, clarifying that this guarantee of citizenship extends to all born in the U.S., including children born to non-citizens. (The "subject to the jurisdiction" clause effectively exempts children of foreign diplomats or of enemy forces during a hostile occupation.)

In response to the most recent challenge to this clear constitutional guarantee by an Executive Order issued by the Trump Administration in 2025, a 6-3 Supreme Court decision (Trump v. Barbara) has struck down that attempt to end birthright citizenship for children born to undocumented or temporarily present parents. The Court's majority ruled that children born in the U.S. to "unlawfully or temporarily present" parents are still within the nation's jurisdiction, again guaranteeing this precious constitutional right that defines our nation as it approaches its 250th anniversary this week.

In his Majority Opinion, Chief Justice Roberts explained that under early English law, children who were born in Britain automatically became British subjects. “This view crossed the Atlantic with the colonists—and was adopted with little fanfare after the Revolution,” Roberts wrote. After the Civil War, the 14th Amendment was adopted to repudiate the Supreme Court’s pre-war 1857 ruling that a Black person whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as enslaved persons was not entitled to any protection from the federal courts because he or she was not a U.S. citizen. In so doing, the Chief Justice asserted, the framers of that amendment intended to “permanently enshrine” the existing understanding of birthright citizenship. “A child born on American soil and subject to American law was made an American citizen.”

“Citizenship, then and now,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ We keep that promise today.”

Obviously, that is good news. The sad news, however, is that at least three of the Justices were willing to set aside the plain text of the 14th amendment. A fourth also agreed with the dissenters that the 14th amendment does not automatically confer universal birthright citizenship, but voted with the majority on the grounds that the President lacked authority to act as he did by an executive order, because that violated the Immigration and Nationality Act. That law currently grants citizenship to those born in the U.S. and "subject to the jurisdiction thereof." Therefore, the President cannot use an executive order to override that congressional statute. 

Had the majority been looking for a narrower ground on which to rule, Chief Justice Roberts could have made that argument, striking down the President's order but avoiding answering the fundamental constitutional question. But that would have possibly opened the door to Congress to change the basis of citizenship by mere legislation, which would have been an insufferable outcome. Thankfully, the majority opted for the fundamental constitutional argument.

All of which highlights how tenuous, how fragile, even our most fundamental constitutional guarantees have become in the hands of this Supreme Court.