O Sant' Antonio

Today's feast of the "Evangelical Doctor," Saint Anthony of Padua (1195-1231), one of the Church's most popular saints, reminds me of my first assignment - as associate pastor at St. Peter's parish, Toronto, in the late 1990s. One of the annual highlights of parish life was the St. Anthony Festival, in which for six years I had the great privilege of carrying the saint's relic in the procession through the neighborhood. What a wonderful parish community I experienced there! Anthony being my middle name, that also makes Saint Anthony one of my patrons. O Saint' Antonio, prega per me!

My grandmother was very devoted to Saint Anthony, to whom she had prayed for the safe return of one of her sons who was serving in the war against Japan. She had a high opinion of his intercession - and was of the opinion that he ranked very high in the heavenly court. Like St. Francis before him - and Padre Pio after - Anthony is indeed very popular. I'm sure the Franciscan habit helps!

It was the Franciscans who gave him the name Anthony when he joined the order in 1220 filled with missionary zeal to imitate the Franciscan martyrs of Morocco. He had been born Ferdinand and had initially pursued a more conventional vocation as a Canon Regular of Saint Augustine in his home city of Lisbon, Portugal. Anthony never got to Morocco. Instead sickness and shipwreck landed him in Italy, where he exercised a fruitful, productive ministry for the rest of his life - hence, the popular identification of Anthony with Italy and Italians' great devotion to him. He was a zealous missionary preacher - and, as anyone who wants to preach should aspire to be, also a very learned one. He was the first Franciscan professor of scripture, and was referred to as "the Living Ark of the Testament" by Pope Gregory IX.

After his death in Padua  on June 13, 1231, he was quickly canonized in less than a year. When his tomb was opened some 30+ years later, his tongue 9with which he had preached so eloquently and effectively) was found to be incorrupt. On that occasion, Saint Bonaventure, held the precious relic in his hands and exclaimed "O blessed tongue, that always blessed the Lord and made others bless and praise him, it is now manifest what great merits you possess in the sight of God!"

Preaching is not the only way God's kingdom advances in this world. As Saint Anthony himself said (in a sermon!): "The man who is filled with the Holy Spirit speaks in different languages. These different languages are different ways of witnessing to Christ, such as humility, poverty, patience, and obedience; we speak in those languages when we reveal in ourselves these virtues to others. actions speak louder than words; let your words teach and your actions speak."

And, as Anthony's own life of heroic sanctity eloquently witnesses, preaching - aimed at true conversion - has its important part to play in evangelization. Historically, it has been understood as a constituent element of the Paulist charism.  Anthony's example of learning and eloquence combined with zeal for souls remains a model to be emulated, as he himself occupies his present prominent place in the Mystical Body as intercessor and miracle-worker.

The Titanic in Tennessee

My friend and fellow Paulist Ivan Tou (presently a pastor in Minneapolis, Minnesota) is in Knoxville this week. So yesterday the two of us  went to the Titanic Museum in Pigeon Forge.  Now what's East Tennessee doing with a Titanic Museum? Good question! This isn't exactly Belfast or Southampton or Cherbourg or Queenstown or New York or Newfoundland - all places with some tangible connection with the Titanic itself, either with its construction or its tragic voyage. And the Titanic clearly wasn't cruising too fast on the Tennessee River that calm, moonless night when it hit an iceberg. Yet here she is! (Or at least a facsimile of half of her!)

For all sorts of reasons, the Titanic's sinking became a quasi-universal tragedy. So perhaps it's presence in Pigeon Forge is not so odd, after all, speaking as it does to the universal interest and emotional responses that the Titanic evokes over a century after her sinking. And in fact it really is a great museum - filled with lots of information about the experience of being on that ill-fated ship and stories about the actual people who had that experience, only one-third of whom survived it. 
The exhibit includes photos taken by the Irish Jesuit Fr. Brown, who sailed on the Titanic from Southampton to Queenstown and took a series of pictures - the only photos we have that were ever taken during the actual voyage (photos found years later in the Jesuit house in Dublin). This summer, the museum also features for the first time in the United States the actual violin that was used by Wallace Hartley on the deck that night. The violin had originally been given him by his fiance, and it is the violin on which Hartley famously played the hymn Nearer My God To Thee, the last music ever heard on the Titanic.
When you enter the museum, you get a "Boarding Pass," with the name and some biographical information about a passenger. I got James Hyland, a 19-year of member of the crew (one of 431 in the crew), whose pencil sketch of the ship is included among the exhibits.  At the end, you pass through the Memorial Room, where you can look up the name and learn his or her fate. My guy survived - and died at age 81! 
The Titanic's tragic end occurred on Low Sunday night. The following Sunday, April 21, 1912, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968) preached about the Titanic: "I believe that, just as we may not approach events such as this one out of curiosity and a thirst for sensation, nor may we disregard them in silence and indifference, however much daily newspaper reports might cause us to do so. Rather they should speak to us. For through them God addresses us with a power and urgency that we only rarely perceive concerning the greatness and nothingness of human beings who are so like God, and yet so unlike him, concerning the wrath and the mercy of the eternal God who reigns in us and over our destinies, sometimes close at hand and tangibly, but sometimes infinitely far away and mysteriously. (Tr. Christopher Asprey, in The Word in this World: Two Sermons by Karl Barth, ed. Karl I. Johnson, 2007)

The Summer of '63

Fifty years ago today, Governor George Wallace famously stood "in the schoolhouse door" to block the integration of the University of Alabama. It was the summer of Civil Rights, the beginning of a much more violent time in American life than post-war Americans had become used to, and also an important transitional season in the struggle for racial equality. The summer ended with the March on Washington and led eventually to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Acts under the effective leadership of President Lyndon Johnson. 

And 1963 was also the year of Buddhist protests in South Vietnam against the American's client, the Catholic President Diem, which culminated in a November 1 coup and led rather inexorably to a pattern of escalation of American military involvement in Vietnam.

The Civil Rights revolution dramatically transformed American society largely for the better. - so much so that it is hard to convey to those not then alive how different things are now. In the process, however, it created a template that claimant group after claimant group has invoked to pursue its own aspirations, regardless of how similar or not its grievances are. One result has been a vastly more open, more tolerant society, which younger people now more or less just take for granted as the obvious state of affairs. That undeniable benefit has been balanced, however, by the elevation of identity politics and a pervasive culture of grievance and victimization. The accompanying "political correctness" had created  its own intellectually "closed" society, which is the problematic underside of our much more open one. Meanwhile, politically, Barry Goldwater's vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act presaged a pattern of political realignment culminating in today's radically polarized political culture of "red states" and "blue states."

Along with the Civil Rights revolution, the Vietnam War was the other major contributor to replacing the world of 1963 with what we have today. Unlike the Civil Rights revolution, Vietnam's legacy was almost entirely negative. A long and destructive war which destroyed far too many lives was lost in the end. Meanwhile it set in motion an ambivalence and uncertainty about America's global role and the use of its military power that remains with us.

The Surveillance Society

In yesterday's New York Times, Ross Douthat ("Your Smartphone Is Watching You") argued that  Americans "understand the essential nature of life on the Internet pretty well. The motto 'nothing to hide, nothing to fear' — or, alternatively, 'abandon all privacy, ye who enter here' — might as well be stamped on every smartphone and emblazoned on every social media log-in page. As the security expert Bruce Schneier wrote recently, it isn’t that the Internet has been penetrated by the surveillance state; it’s that the Internet, in effect, is a surveillance state." 

Douthat is legitimately concerned about the effects of this - an atmosphere in which. "radicalism and protest will seem riskier, paranoia will be more reasonable, and conspiracy theories will proliferate." But he also recognizes that "genuinely dangerous people will often be pre-empted or more swiftly caught," and he accordingly concludes that many will find this "privacy-for-security swap" to be reasonable, "especially when there is no obvious alternative short of disconnecting from the Internet entirely" (certainly something most of us are obviously ill-disposed to do).

For all the noise about infringements to our "privacy," the fact is that my phone records are not my private records but the business records of a commercial entity. My credit card companies keep track of my purchases. So does Amazon and any other company that has my credit card number on file. When we debate (as we rightly ought to) the implications of the growing surveillance state, we have to start with the realistic recognition that ours is already a surveillance society - something which is an inevitable by-product of the technologies our society has created and most of us have largely embraced. 
Of course, the State has police power. So allowing the State access to all sorts of "private" information is not exactly the same as banks and other commercial entities having such access. Still, it is this surveillance society that makes the surveillance state possible - and much more acceptable to people.

Add to that the concern - both legitimate and exaggerated - for personal and national security. It's probably true that we crave more security from life's misfortunes than we can realistically attain. An ongoing New York Times discussion "Risk and Legal Fear in Schools" addresses the increasing contemporary obsession with creating a perfectly secure environment, something which is probably impossible and probably would be somewhat unhealthy were it actually achievable. The fact is that life is risky, and no matter how hard we try to be totally safe bad things do sometimes happen. The absurd effort to hype last September's tragedy in Benghazi into some sort of scandal presumes a context that suggests that somehow governments can be expected to guarantee total security from any bad things happening anywhere anytime. 

On the other hand, government's principal responsibility is national defense and security. Striking the balance between a robust pursuit of our national defense and domestic security in this time of terrorism and unrealistic expectations of total safety is a preeminently political discernment (an adult activity our current political culture is ill equipped to undertake, but which must be faced).

I don't know the answers to  all these questions. If ever deliberation and debate were called for, this would be an instance. It doesn't help, however, when, on the one hand, every example of something bad happening is treated as a failure to be corrected by increased limits on liberty, or, on the other hand, our constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties are automatically invoked in ways which do not respect citizens' legitimate fears and legitimate desire for some reasonable level of security.

Two Widows

When St. Paul wanted to make his case to the Christian community in Galatia, he felt the need to introduce himself, to talk about his background, and to make the case for his authority in terms of how he came to be an apostle [Galatians 1:11-19]. The same was true with many of the Old Testament prophets – but not with the prophet Elijah. One of the most famous and important prophets in all of Israel’s history, Elijah just appeared on the scene so to speak, with not much introduction, to reprimand the wicked King Ahab. His arrival coincided with a severe drought, which led him to seek the hospitality of a certain poor widow. Then, after a year during which Elijah’s presence had been a blessing for the widow and her only son, suddenly the son got sick and died [1 Kings 17:17-24]. Not much repayment for her hospitality!

Nowadays it is divorce, which is more often the ticket to poverty for women and children. In the ancient world, being left a widow without a man to provide for her often led to poverty and destitution – as it often still did in our own society before Social Security and Medicare. So no wonder the widow was angry at Elijah and Elijah’s God! But, instead of reacting defensively when challenged by the widow’s grief and anger, Elijah seemed to take her side. He called out to the Lord, “will you afflict event he widow with whom I am staying by killing her son?” And the Lord heard his prayer, and Elijah was able to return the boy alive to his mother.

Elijah is remembered for many things. One of them is this story of his compassion for this widow. Jesus mentioned it in his hometown synagogue in one of the early episodes of his public life [Luke 4:26].Unlike the story of Elijah and the widow, we don’t know what in particular may have brought Jesus to a city called Nain [Luke 9:11b-17],where, lo and behold, he was greeted at the city gate by another grieving widow, mourning her only son (to borrow St. Augustine’s famous phrase, misery meeting up with mercy). Jesus had no prior connection with her, had not received her hospitality, didn’t owe her anything so to speak. But that didn’t block his compassion. It was that compassion, in fact, which created a connection. Moved with pity for her, he touched the coffin, and said, “Young man, I tell you arise!” The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother.

Both these events were revelations of God. In Elijah’s case, the widow declared: “The word of God comes truly from your mouth.” At Nain, the crowd exclaimed “A great prophet has arisen in our midst”and “God has visited his people.” These incredibly miraculous events identified Elijah and Jesus as true prophets, great prophets, who embodied God’s word, and revealed God’s power. But more than power, they revealed God’s presence. “God has visited his people”!

In those otherwise unimportant places, God visited his people – unimportant people, poor people, widows with no source of support, sons whose lives were being cut short way ahead of time. God didn’t just visit. He connected. Elijah and Jesus connected directly by touching the dead, which, of course, risked ritual impurity from contact with a dead body. Elijah and Jesus didn’t just speak God’s word, they acted it out, by touching, by becoming one with the dead, and thus bonding with all grieving and suffering people there and everywhere.

Both Elijah in anticipation and Jesus in fulfillment were revealing the kingdom of God – not just talking about it as an abstract theory, but making it happen in our lives by bonding with us. And, like the widow’s son, our only response to the surge of new life within us must be to get up and speak. Like the grieving widows and the people in the crowd, we too must recognize God’s word at work in our world, God visiting his people.

And not just visiting, but staying with us – in his Church! Our human lives are created by the power of God, but they are maintained and sustained by his incredible compassion. We are witnesses as well as beneficiaries of that compassion and are called upon to continue to express it and share it in our lives together as a Church, embodying God’s new kingdom in our world.

Homily for the 10th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, June 9, 2013.