Cum Beato Joseph

Somewhere in his famous day-by-day account of Vatican II, Xavier Rynne recounts one bishop's somewhat impassioned appeal for Saint Joseph's name to be inserted into the Canon of the Mass. That bishop was not alone in this desire. That same fall my high school religion teacher had suggested that St. Joseph's inclusion in the Canon might be one outcome of the Council. In the year before the Council, a petition had been circulated (signed by some 100,000 people in the US alone) requesting St. Joseph's inclusion in four of the five prayers in the Missal which mentioned specific saints - the Confiteor in the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar, the Suscipe Santa Trinitas at the Offertory, the Communicantes in the Canon, and Libera Nos, Domine  after the Our Father. It was, nonetheless, something of a surprise when, at the Council's 18th General Session on November 13, 1962, it was announced that Pope John XXIII had ordered St. Joseph's name to be included in the Communicantes, effective that coming December 8. The change altered that liturgical list of apostles and early Roman martyrs for the first time since about the 6th century.

 

Since then, the Roman Rite as a whole and the venerable Roman Canon itself have undergone changes unimaginable in 1962. But Pope John's devotional addition of the name of the patron of the Universal Church has remained in Eucharistic Prayer I (as the Roman Canon is now called). Not too many years after its addition, however, as part of the post-conciliar liturgical reformation, Pope Paul VI added alternative Eucharistic Prayers II, III, and IV, none of which specifically included St. Joseph. In my experience, apart from certain special days and certain special occasions, most people rarely hear Eucharistic Prayer I. So, in spite of Blessed John XXIII's historic intervention, St. Joseph rarely gets much mentioned in most people's ordinary experience of Mass.

 

All that is now about to change. Fifty years later, petitions were again received in Rome on the subject of St. Joseph. According to a May 1 Decree of the Congregation for Divine Worship, beato Joseph, eius sponso is now to be added immediately after the reference to the Blessed Virgin Mary in Eucharistic Prayers II, III, and IV.

 

Obviously, this change adds nothing to St. Joseph's heavenly stature, but it is a salutary reminder of his quiet but significant supporting role in salvation history and of his present position as patron of the Universal Church. According to the Congregation's Decree, St. Joseph "stands as an exemplary model of the kindness and humility that the Christian faith raises to a great destiny, and demonstrates the ordinary and simple virtues necessary for me to be good and genuine followers of Christ." Kindness and humility seem to be in particularly short supply  in post-modern societies, which seem systematically to devalue ordinary and simple virtues. Both those who recite and those who hear the Eucharistic Prayer are hardly immune to cultural contagion, and presumably we will all benefit from being reminded of the unassuming qualities of substance, dedication, and integrity St. Joseph models for the world - qualities which in 1863, during the tragic experience of the American Civil War,  caused Isaac Hecker to call St. Joseph "The Saint of Our Day."

To War or Not to War

Part of being a "Great Power" (a fortiori, a "Superpower") is a certain global responsibility to use one's power judiciously to maintain a stable balance of power in the world. I have never had any sympathy with isolationism, which I regard as an unrealistic ideology and an irresponsible one.
That said, Syria is a mess. And that indisputable fact, far from clarifying what the US should be doing in that region, really rather obfuscates it - and argues, in my opinion, more powerfully against intervention than for it.
Some 90,000+ people have been killed in consequence of Syria's civil war, while many others have been displaced, to their own detriment and that of the stability of neighboring countries (e.g., Jordan). It is a genuine humanitarian crisis, which naturally invites the question what, if anything, might be done about it. It is also a serious political crisis threatening to destabilize the region even further. The Syrian regime is supported by Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah - three good reasons not to want it to remain. The alternatives, however, are ambiguous at best. The defeat of Assad would likely lead to a further civil war between competing revolutionary factions, and the likely result could well be worse for the world than what is there now.
So I think this certainly seems to be one of those times when prudence should cause one to be very wary of intervention. At minimum, any argument for intervention should be required to spell out the exact aims to be achieved and where that fits into a larger international strategy and by what military means it can realistically be hoped to achieve those aims.
At the moment Asad seems to be gaining (with outside help, of course). Those who think that the US has some vital national interest in ending the Asad regime have reason to be worried whether the prospect of such an outcome is decreasing. But others also have reason to be worried - worried that we don't have a clear and coherent picture of what  alternative we might be able to achieve and how we might actually get to it, worried further that we may end up in the long run only arming our enemies. 

Obviously, were we able to wave a magic wand and stop the carnage, we should surely do so. In contrast to waving a magic wand, however, our options are much more traditional - military intervention (more or less, directly or indirectly) on one side or other. 

But which of several sides, and how much help, how deep and long our involvement, and for what hoped-for final outcome? 

The Borgias

To reach the Roman church of  S. Pietro in Vincoli from Via Cavour during my Roman sojourn, I climbed a stone stairway, officially called Via S. Francesco di Paola. But that stairway is also known as Salita dei Borgia, because it passes under an archway which was part of the house of Vannozza Cattanei, mistress of Pope Alexander VI and mother of Giovanni, Cesare, Lucrezia, and Gioffre Borgia. Giovanni Borgia, Duke of Gandia (referred to by his Spanish name, Juan, in the TV series), may well have been murdered there in 1497, possibly by either one of his two brothers. 

That the just concluded Showtime series The Borgias unambiguously portrays Cesare Borgia as his brother's killer is just one of the liberties that series may have taken with history. For example, the SHO series portrays Cesare Borgia as killing three Sforzas - Giovanni (Lucrezia's first husband), Ludovico (Duke of Milan), and Benito (Catarina Sforza's son). In fact, all three outlived Cesare. Savanarola was executed in Florence, not Rome. Nor was the real Michelleto illiterate. Cesare likely did kill Lucrezia's second husband, Alfonso of Aragon, but most likely for political not personal reasons (after which, the historical Lucrezia went on to a happier and more successful third marriage).

Of course, The Borgias is hardly the first historical drama to be historically challengeable, none of which necessarily detracts from its dramatic artistry. And the series certainly does an effective job of dramatizing the milieu of Renaissance Italy - its politics, diplomacy, warfare, and court life - opening a window onto a world we assume to be so very different from our own. In the process, however, it may narrow our ability to understand and appreciate the real historical Borgias and their actual world.

Thus, presumably to highlight Cesare and make him more sympathetic to the TV audience, the older Borgia brother (the Duke of Gandia) is portrayed the most malevolently. In fact, however, he did not kill the Ottoman Prince Cem, for example. And, whatever his faults, his daughter became a nun and his grandson a Jesuit and a saint - Saint Francis Borgia. (Juan still has descendants with the Borgia name in South America, one of whom became President of Ecuador!)

Nor does the series do full justice to the complex pontificate of Alexander VI, although all the Borgias, Alexander among them, do tend to be portrayed less uni-dimensionally and with more nuance than Juan. Historically, Alexander seems to have been an effective administrator and reasonably successful politically in his Italian renaissance context, something that does actually come across in the series, despite the emphatic overlay of scandal that seems everywhere to surround him.

Apparently, Cesare Borgia was thought of as an irreligious man even in his own time, which is certainly saying something. So it is not necessarily anachronistic for the TV series to portray him that way. But the complex emotional relationship depicted between Cesare and his father may in the end be beyond our ability to access with any accuracy. It may make sense for our psychologized culture to project onto father and son such intense sentiments as were expressed in the dramatic confrontation between them in the next-to-last episode. But we really cannot access their feelings, nor would they have shared our modern psychologized vocabulary in which to express them.

That, of course, is always a problem with any modern historical drama. We today are much more interested in the feelings and emotional lives of historical characters than their contemporaries probably were, and we have invented a complex vocabulary to talk about such things, a vocabulary that they and their contemporaries lacked. Similarly, a secularizing society such as ours, even when it admits the factual omnipresence of religion in previous periods of history, will increasingly find it hard to comprehend the complex way in which religious belief and religious feeling were interwoven into all aspects of ordinary life.

Lavish Love

As is sadly so often the case, today’s reading about King David [2 Samuel 12:7-13] is such a small excerpt from a larger episode that someone unfamiliar with the whole story might have some trouble figuring out exactly what’s going on. Even so, it is clear that David has committed a serious sin, but that God forgives him. David does actually get punished for his sin, but God’s commitment to the royal family of David is decisive. So he was forgiven and kept his special place in God’s plan.

The situation is completely different in the Gospel, however, where we meet another sinner, but a non-royal, not at all important, anonymous one [Luke 7:36 – 8:3]. I stress her anonymity, because this story has historically been the basis for a famous case of mistaken identity – identifying the sinful woman in this story with Mary Magdalene. The confusion may have been caused originally by the fact that Mary Magdalene does get mentioned at the end of the story – not, however, as the sinful woman but rather as one of the wealthy women, whom Jesus had healed and who accompanied Jesus, and helped pay the bills. (Mary Magdalene and her friends remind us that, from the start, the Church’s mission has always depended on collaborators able and willing to provide material support; but Mary Magdalene herself has nothing to do with the sinful woman earlier in the story).

Another common misunderstanding, which this story can help correct, concerns Jesus’ relationship with the Pharisees. The Pharisees were pious laymen, committed to living as religiously as possible, devoted to observing faithfully all the commandments of the law, but living in the world (not going off to the desert as some other groups did, for example). The Pharisees also had certain distinctive beliefs that separated them from the more conservative, priestly aristocracy, known as the Sadducees. Jesus shared many of the Pharisees’ beliefs – for example, belief in the eventual resurrection of the dead. After the destruction of the Temple, the Pharisees would emerge as the leaders in post-Temple Judaism, setting the stage for the next 2000 years of Jewish life. Their only real rivals would be the one other group to emerge from 1^st-century Judaism – the Christians.

Reflecting the later 1^st-century quarrel between Jews who accepted Jesus as their Messiah and those who did not, the New Testament highlights the conflicts between Jesus and the Pharisees. Still, stories such as this, in which a Pharisee invited Jesus to dine with him, remind us that the actual relationship was not always hostile in every respect.

Needless to say, this was not coffee at Starbucks. It was a real meal in a home, the kind of social and religious fellowship one did not normally share with just anyone.

Shortly before, Jesus had been acclaimed (as we heard last week) as a great prophet. Prophecy had by then officially ceased in Israel and was not expected to reappear until the coming of God’s kingdom. Hence the excitement generated first by John the Baptist and then by Jesus himself. Was Jesus really a prophet? Was he the prophet they were expecting? And how would one know for sure?

This accounts for the Pharisee’s reaction. If Jesus were really a prophet, the Pharisee figured, he would know who and what sort of woman was touching him! He probably wasn’t alone in wondering. Formal dinners were public events. The woman’s presence in the crowd watching the festivities was no big thing, but weeping and bathing Jesus’ feet with her tears, wiping them with her hair, and kissing and anointing them, that was not normally accepted behavior. If she didn’t have a reputation already, such behavior certainly assured her one!

Simon the Pharisee kept his reaction to himself. But we know his thoughts. And we know who Jesus really is! And Jesus does know who and what sort of woman is touching him even better than the Pharisee does. Hence his little parable about the two debtors – suggesting that if only Simon understood his own need for forgiveness, then he too might respond to Jesus just as the woman did.

The point, of course, is that we all need forgiveness. The anonymous woman appreciated what Jesus had to offer – nothing less than the forgiveness of sin and reconciliation with God. The Pharisee had taken an important first step in inviting Jesus to dinner, but that was as far as he was ready to go. Like David before him, he could recognize others’ sinfulness but seemed clueless about his own.

When we hear this story, knowing already who Jesus is, we recognize the insufficiency of the Pharisee’s hospitality – because, from God’s perspective, everyone is like the debtors in the parable. Everyone is totally unable to repay. Everyone needs to be forgiven by God, who is willing to write off our debts, reconciling us to himself through Jesus his Son. So everyone should really respond to Jesus as exuberantly and lavishly as the sinful woman in the story.

The story ends with Jesus on the move again, journeying from one town and village to another, preaching and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God, accompanied by the Twelve and some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities. What was that already but the Church in miniature? What was that but what the Church was then and what it must likewise be now – a community of forgiven sinners, reconciled to God and to one another, recognizing what Jesus had to offer and embracing him in a life lived in love, caring for one another and the world in a life lived in love!

 

Homily for the 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, June 15, 2013.

Man of Steel

I went to see the new Superman movie, Man of Steel, earlier today. I generally avoid action movies and have little feel for science fiction. But, having grown up with Superman comics and the George Reeves' 1950s Superman TV series, I find each new iteration of the Superman story almost irresistible. 

As I posted earlier this afternoon on Facebook, the movie has more mayhem and special effects silliness than anyone should need, but I thought it was worth it in spite of that. That's partly because - special effects silliness aside - the timeless story still soars, as of course does the star, Henry Cavill (formerly the Duke of Suffolk in Showtime's series, The Tudors). Thus, critic Kenneth Turan claims that Cavill is “a superb choice for someone who needs to convincingly convey innate modesty, occasional confusion and eventual strength.” I would agree, and add that Russell Crowe and Kevin Costner are excellent as Superman/Clark's kryptonian and human father respectively - the two figures who together formed him into the unique being he is.

What makes the Superman myth so special is how it highlights what one could call its "incarnational" theme - the alien who becomes human and who, while remaining kryptonian, identifies himself fully with the human race for the salvation of the human race. The analogy is not perfect, of course. No analogy ever is. But the parallel has been made many times. And it does resonate enough to be immediately recognizable. 

Indeed, one of the problems with the inevitable overdoing of the special effects silliness is how it distracts from Superman's assumption of humanity, how his identification with humanity determines his decisions - as does his heroic (but admittedly still human) morality. One of the most poignant lines in the movies is when one of the kryptonian villains tells Kal-El/Clark that the fact that he has morality will be his undoing, that the kyrptonians have evolved beyond morality, and that evolution always wins. The movie's outcome poses the possibility - and the hope - that that may be wrong.

Of course, evolution did win on Krypton, which was why the planet destroyed itself - because its culture had destroyed itself morally. It's not that Kal-El somehow rose above a decadent kryptonian culture, but rather that he escaped being formed by it and instead was formed in a non-decadent human culture (a traditional farming family in Kansas) which still had serious moral values.