Holidays

In the 1942 film classic Holiday Inn, Bing Crosby buys a farmhouse, intending to retire, but soon turns it into an Inn (complete with lavish entertainment) that’s open only on holidays. That was when holidays were still something special.

When I was growing up, the term “spring break” was foreign to us. (If we heard it at all, it was in the annual news coverage of misbehaving college students in Florida – nothing that had anything to do directly with us). Of course, we had our “Easter Vacation,” a substatial "break" beginning at mid-day on the Wednesday of Holy Week and continuing through all of Easter Week. But in addition to our “Easter Vacation,” we also had a whole bunch of holidays.

The “spring term,” which began officially on or near February 1 (thus inadvertently replicating ancient Celtic seasonal consciousness), included several such holidays. February gave us Lincoln’s (February 12) and Washington’s (February 22) Birthdays. March 17 was St. Patrick’s Day – not a legal holiday, of course, but a holiday for Catholic school children in New York, whose “rightly constituted principal patron” St. Patrick is. May brought another religious holiday - Ascension Thursday - and a big legal holiday, Memorial Day, which we typically observed (as the holiday was originally intended to be observed) by visiting the cemetery.

Whatever still lingered of the properly civic meaning of those legal holidays was eviscerated in 1971, when the Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968 went into effect. This law moved four federal legal holidays (Washington’s Birthday, Memorial Day, Columbus Day, and Veterans Day) from their proper dates to designated Mondays – in order to create four fixed 3-day weekends for federal employees (and by extension others as well). Veterans Day was soon moved back to its traditional date (November 11), but none of the other holidays has had a comparable constituency sufficiently concerned about its essential civic meaning to get its traditional date restored.

In a sense, none of this matters much anymore. Along with the loss of the civic significance of days like Washington’s Birthday, has come the loss of any real sense of “holiday” at all. More and more people have to work on the holiday. Schools and even banks are now open in some jurisdictions. Even the parish office is open today!

Of course, it also used to be the case that there was a weekly holiday called Sunday, to which these occasional extra holidays were wonderful additions. When Constantine the Great declared Sunday a legal holiday in the Roman Empire in A.D. 321, he did a true service to humanity (not quite, but almost, as significant as his legalization of Christianity). It is obviously no accident that with the decline of public Christianity in the West has come the decline of Sunday as a real holiday when people don’t do ordinary activities and instead worship God and enjoy life. Sunday may still appear printed in red on our calendars, a vestigial relic of our once Christian culture. Likewise, Washington’s Birthday may also still appear in red, a relic of our once vibrant civic culture. With Sunday the ur-holiday now diminished almost beyond recognition, is it any wonder Washington’s Birthday now seems so insignificant – both diminished along with the world which produced them?

Be Perfect

“Be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect” [Matthew 5:48].

Sounds pretty demanding, doesn’t it? Not just “be good,” but “be perfect” – just as our heavenly Father is perfect.

And demanding it is. No question about it! Extreme as it may sound, however, there was in fact nothing new really in Jesus’ demand. We just heard the Lord tell Moses: “Speak to the whole Israelite community and tell them: Be holy, for I, the Lord, your God, am holy” [Leviticus 19:1-2].

God is holy. So his people should also be holy. Holiness describes who God actually is and must likewise describe who we are if we are actually God’s people – and must also then have recognizable consequences for the kind of person I am and the kind of person I am becoming as a member of God’s community.

St. Paul picks up on the same theme: Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you … the temple of God, which you are, is holy [1 Corinthians 3:16-17].

Now the way this translates from God to me is revealed in how I behave in relation to others. Listen again to Moses:
“You shall not bear hatred for your brother or sister in your heart.”

“Take no revenge and cherish no grudge against any of your people.”
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” [Lev. 19:17-18]

But again it is not a case of translating an abstract ethical proposition into its concrete applications. It’s how God behaves, because that is who God is. It’s how we actually experience God behaving. Our heavenly Father, Jesus reminds us, “makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust.” [Mt. 5:45]

That the scorching desert sun afflicts the good as well as the bad and that the life-giving rain, which makes the land livable, benefits the unjust as well as on the just was something perfectly obvious to Jesus’ contemporaries – as it should be to us.

Demanding indeed is the challenge Jesus poses to his disciples – and no less so for being already familiar from the Old Testament. It represents a real challenge to our ordinary common sense. If it’s super demanding, it is because it goes against so much of what our ordinary experience identifies for us as common sense. For the reality is that it is the most natural and seemingly sensible thing in the world to bear hatred in one’s heart, to take revenge, and to cherish grudges. Going that extra mile and loving one’s enemies don’t make much sense – at least not in the immediate term. On our own, none of us would likely get beyond the ever-tightening circle of anger, hatred, and resentment. It’s only when we get beyond ourselves – or more precisely are taken beyond ourselves by God’s grace – that we recognize what my local Paulist superior, Fr, Charlie Donahue, has called “the rippling damage in not living a reconciling life.”

Becoming the person God is calling one to be involves much more than just getting over our anger and letting go of our resentments. It means making God’s holiness my own, letting God’s holiness take over my life, letting God’s perfection make up for my imperfection.

Homily for the 7th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, February 20, 2011.

The President's Religion (Again)

Like the really dumb debate about his birthplace, the President's religion remains an issue that just won't seem to go away. According to the Pew Research Center, 18% of Americans think President Obama is a Muslim, only 34% claim to know that he is a Christian, and 43% say they don't know his religion.

The President's birthplace, of course, is a confirmable fact. That my not matter much to those to whom facts don't matter. There are always extremists at both ends of the spectrum, for whom ideology inevitably trumps facts - whether it's who killed JFK or whether the world's climate is really changing or whatever. When I was a grad student, I remember reading and quoting (probably approvingly in some particularly benighted moment) the claim that there is something "conservative" about the very notion of a "fact." There are conservatives and there are conservatives, of course, but one of the more charming characteristics of traditional conservatives (not the radical and destabilizing movements that pass for "conservative" in contemporary politics) is a certain respect for facts - for the inherent givens of human nature, history, etc.

But I digress - back to President Obama's religion! That the President did join a church at a certain point in his life is - like being born in Hawaii - an historical fact. What that may actually mean in terms of his belief system today is, of course, another matter, more open to legitimate interpretation. Therein may lie the problem, inasmuch as the President does not so frequently display the predictable external markers of Christian identification that Americans have been accustomed to. expect in their presidents. That may be unfortunate for a whole host of reasons, but still it is quite a leap - a most unjustified leap - to jump from that observation to refusing to accept the President's repeated assertion that he is a believing Christian.

And now along comes Bill Maher - a self-appointed anti-religious zealot - who has declared that he too does not believe President Obama is telling the truth about his religion. As Brent Decker of The Washington Times put it, "With friends like Mr. Maher, Mr. Obama doen't need enemies."

I don't know how much of a "friend" of Obama, Bill Maher actually is. I'm guessing he likes Obama. Perhaps he's the sort of ideologue who expects that other smart people really agree with him, because what else would really smart people believe? I really just don't know. (But I guess Maher would really like it for the President to be in reality a skeptical, secular humanist - like himself).

Apparently, the issue came up in the context of Maher's also not believing that the President is politically a centrist. Being a "centrist" is certainly an even more malleable identity than being a Christian. So there is certainly room for legitimate debate about what that means and whether it is a reasonable description of the President's policies. Extremists at the other end from Maher routinely imply that the President is some sort of "socialist" seeking to impose a "socialist" (or at least a "European") style agenda on America. Intentionally or not, Maher oddly seems to be adding more plausibility to that interpretation.

(My own view, for what little it may be worth, is that the President may perhaps be more culturally liberal personally than any of his predecessors, but that his political ideology is indeed on the whole centrist.)

But I'm digressing again!

In the end, it was left to my one-time Princeton classmate Cornel West to defend the President's Christian self-identification, which he did very effectively.

Way to go, Cornel!

The Inner Challenge Facing the Church

Analyzing the decline and/or success of American religion in general - and of American Catholicism in particular - has become a staple of contemporary religious journalism. When I read the Pew Forum's 2008 "Religious Landscape Survey" last fall, I even devoted my pastor's column in the parish bulletin one week to its implications. So it was with interest that I read what veteran Vatican analyst John Allen had to say about it in his blog last week.

What Allen calls "the banner headline" is that there are now some 22 million ex-Catholics in the U.S. In itself that is hardly news. It has long been observed that, in terms of numbers at least, ex-Catholics could easily be counted as a major denomination in its own right; and that, were it not for immigration, the shrinkage of the Catholic Church in the U.S. would be much more dramatically evident. Numbers, of course, are just that - numbers. It is their interpretation that is interesting - and relevant to any future plan of action. Not surprisingly, given the internal ideological polarization of American Catholicism, interpretations vary - typically in accord with the interpreter's ideological predispositions. So it was interesting to read Allen's blog, based on his conversations with the Pew researchers themselves.

Personally, I found their interpretation somewhat mixed. On the one hand, they stress the fact that losing members is part and parcel of the American religious landscape, and that the Catholic Church (while losing many members) does not seem to be doing so disproportionately in comparison with other religious groups. So the key element in their analysis is the Church's apparently poor performance in recruiting new members - its ratio of recruitment to retention - all, of course, still somewhat obscured by the effect of immigration, which has kept Catholics at about one-quarter of the U.S. population despite its losses in members and failure to recruit replacements. On the other hand, however (and this to me seems the more problematic part of the analysis), the analysts suggest that the Church is serving is current members well enough, thus confirming that the pastoral problem facing the church is its failure at evangelization.

The analysts ascribe much of the movement out of the Church to life-cycle changes. Some 2/3 of ex-Catholics leave by age 23. Some become Evangelicals (1 in 10 American Evangelicals is a former Catholic). Others enter mainline Protestant denominations. Many others affiliate with no church. The analysts attempt to be even-handed in regard to "conservative" vs. "liberal" explanations and place a lot of emphasis on non-ideological "drift." (71% of those who are "unaffiliated" apparently fall into that last category). Even so, the data seem to support a moderately "conservative" analysis. Prescinding from such unsurprising factors such as marriage to a non-Catholic, it has to be striking that so many Evangelicals are ex-Catholics. Whatever their motives, it's hardly likely that they became Evangelicals out of anger at the Church for its not having fulfilled some "liberal" agenda. Perhaps more to the point, the fact that so much of the Church's losses occur at the cusp of adolescence and young adulthood at least reinforces the "conservative" critique of American Catholic religious education. Other factors are certainly in play to be sure, but the pattern - especially the "drift" hypothesis - seems to confirm the failure of religious education (something probably self-evident to most Catholics outside the religious education establishment). Of course, it could be that it was always thus. I know plenty of people of my generation who, like me, went to Catholic schools and received a solid foundation in the faith, but then drifted away after the 1960s. Certainly, catechism by itself is never enough in the absence of institutional and cultural support for the faith - precisely what self-destructed at the same time religious education self-destructed.

All of which brings me to the peculiar claim that the Church is serving its existing members well. Even granting the cultural context in which Americans easily switch religions, it simply has to be seen as a major pastoral problem when so many Catholics do so. That so many younger Catholics do so certainly suggests the possibility that, however well we may be serving older generations, we are not serving younger Catholics as well. Again, perhaps it was ever so. For a long time, I think, we have relied on the life-cycle - specifically getting married and having children - to re-integrate younger Catholics into regular observance, and we all know what has happened to that once-normal life-cycle pattern and any expectations based upon it. (All the more reason, perhaps, to emphasize - as I suspect "conservatives" are increasingly more likely to be attentive to - the need for a more adequate and complete catechesis that can compensate for the lack of the familial, social, and cultural factors that used to supply in its place!)

Finally, for all the attention lavished on RCIA these last 30+ years, the analysts certainly seem correct in highlighting the systemic weakness of Catholic recruitment. That said, however, the pattern of systemic loss - especially that due to "drift" - needs to be recognized for the profound pastoral problem that it is.

In the 19th century, Servant of God Isaac Hecker sought to highlight the essentially evangelizing mission of the Church. He was always acutely aware, however, that for the Church to attract outsiders to it, its inner house must be in order. Just as grace builds on nature, a Catholic community with a vibrant evangelizing mission must, first of all, be a vibrant Catholic community, its vibrancy rooted in the best possible quality of pastoral care and formation for all its members.

Lourdes

On three occasions in the past decade, I have had the opportunity to visit the shrine of Lourdes in France and have even been privileged to celebrate Mass in the famous Grotto, where the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to St. Bernadette Soubirous a total of 18 times, from February 11 to July 16, 1858. As I suspect almost anyone who has ever been there will gladly confirm, it is certainly an awesomely inspiring experience to go as a pilgrim to that beautiful and special place – joining the 5 million people of varied backgrounds who journey to that holy shrine each year. Lourdes, like Rome, offers that very special experience of the universality of the Church, as one joins one’s prayer with pilgrims from all over the world in such great gatherings as the daily procession with the Blessed Sacrament and the evening candlelight procession and group rosary. It is especially inspiring to see so many sick people travel to Lourdes to pray for physical and spiritual healing there, and also to observe the compassionate and loving way in which the sick are welcomed and enabled to participate in all the various activities. Since 1858, the Church has recognized some 65 miracles at Lourdes. In addition to the Grotto itself, the shrine also features the miraculous spring of water, from which one can drink and into which one can submerge oneself – as I did one very cold morning on my first pilgrimage to Lourdes. (I still have a supply of Lourdes water from my last trip there). The shrine also includes four distinct churches, three beautiful churches built one on top of the other, each larger than the one below. The fourth church, separate from the previous three, is actually an enormous underground basilica, which was dedicated by Blessed John XXIII in March 1858, in the centennial year of the apparitions, just a few months before his election as Pope. Since 1992, today’s feast of Our Lady of Lourdes has also been designated as the World Day of the Sick. In so designating it, Pope John Paul II (who certainly knew something about the experience of sickness in human life) called it “a special time of prayer and sharing, of offering one’s suffering for the good of the Church, and of reminding us to see in our sick brother and sister the face of Christ who, by suffering, dying, and rising, achieved the salvation of humankind.”