Conceived without Sin

O Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee!

When I was in elementary school, that invocation and response were an integral part of our regular school prayers. Although I dutifully responded pray for us who have recourse to thee, I suspect that, for some of those years at least, I probably had no clue what the word recourse really meant. Given the high quality of the religious instruction we received, my guess is that I had a better understanding of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception before I ever actually got to understand the meaning of the word recourse!

When, in 1858,  the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to St. Bernadette Soubirous in the out-of-the-way town of Lourdes in the Pyrenees Mountains, she identified herself with the words, “I am the Immaculate Conception.” Bernadette did not recognize the reference nor understand its meaning. Nor did she know that scholars had been arguing about its meaning for centuries. In 1497, the University of Paris had even decreed that no one should be admitted to the University without first swearing to assert and defend Mary’s Immaculate Conception! (Presumably that requirement is no longer in force).

In 1846, the U.S. bishops unanimously chose Mary, under the title of her Immaculate Conception, as Patroness of our country. Eight year later, in 1854 Blessed Pope Pius IX infallibly defined the essence of the Church’s belief about Mary’s Immaculate Conception – the Church’s faith that, thanks to the salvation Jesus accomplished on our behalf, Mary was preserved from sin, from the very beginning of her existence, and so was from the very start completely holy. She is, as the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth [1770-1850] famously called her “Our tainted nature’s solitary boast.” Meanwhile, soon after Pius IX’s dogmatic definition, the small and struggling Catholic community in Knoxville, TN, purchased a lot here on Summit Hill outside what were then the town’s northern limits, intending to build their first parish church here. At its dedication later that year, the new church was named for the Immaculate Conception. “We should all be especially devoted to the Immaculate Conception,” Thomas Merton wrote in 1940, “whose feast was given us especially for our time.”

The story we just heard from the Old Testament [Genesis 3:9-15, 20] highlights the serious damage done by Adam and Eve to themselves and to the rest of the world - and the damage all of us have continued to do to ourselves and to our world, through our alienation from God. Mary, however, represents the healing effect of God’s far-greater power - God’s far-greater power that empowered her to say Yes” to God where Adam and Eve had said “No” – God’s powerful plan to save us from ourselves.

The story calls Eve the mother of all the living. In spite of sin, human life continued – the very first sign that God was not going to give up on us. Of course, the serpent still lives and continues his mischief, but his doom is already certain. Eve’s greatest descendant and Mary’s Son will strike at the serpent’s head and crush him.

God’s great plan for our salvation, the mystery decided upon from all eternity and hidden for so many centuries, has been realized in Mary’s Son, Jesus, and is now revealed in the life and mission of the Church. Mary’s holiness at the very beginning of her earthly life is also the Church’s holiness at its beginning and invites us to look forward to the Church as she will one day be in the perfect holiness of God’s kingdom.

O Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to you!

Homily for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, December 8, 2018.

Photo: Sanctuary Window of the Immaculate Conception, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN.

Bush Funeral Afterthoughts

"What does it tell you that the feel-good events in Washington these days are funerals?" asks Susan Glasser at the beginning of her article in The New Yorker, reflecting on Wednesday's state funeral for former President George H, W. Bush ("George H. W. Bush's Funeral Was the Corny, Feel-Good Moment That Washington Craves," December 5, 2018). 

Few American rituals manage to be as majestic as a presidential state funeral. Its repeated renditions of Hail the the Chief remind us that, for better or for worse, in our system our politician President is also our Head of State, the embodiment of the nation, the closest we come to a king, with all the symbolic resonance kingship conveys. 

Of course, that all seems even that much more salient in our present circumstance, dramatized (if more drama were needed) by the contrast between the uncomfortable-looking incumbent President and the chummy, chatty former presidents he had to share a cathedral pew with. As Glasser noted, while the Bushes went out of their way to be gracious to Trump, "all that well-bred graciousness" came across as "a brilliant act of Waspy revenge," as Trump had to sit through hours of hearing his predecessor "extolled in terms that wold never be applied to him" and "knowing that every statement praising Bush's decency and modesty and courage would be taken as an implicit rebuke of him."

But what does it say about the tragic transformation of our public life that everything now seems to be refracted through a Trumpian lens? Bush got the funeral that his high office - and his inevitably flawed but many decent personal qualities - deserved. "You don't have to accept the Bush family legacy," Glasser noted, "to say that he "seemed like a genuinely nice guy, if a bit miscast in a profession in which Trump may have the better of the argument that nice guys finish last." 

In our merciless era when one sin seems sufficient to damn one forever, some still remain too obsessed with Willie Horton to concede anything at all to either Bush's personal virtues or his political accomplishments. But isn't that precisely what a funeral challenges us to do? And not just as an act of belatedly balancing the historical record!

No, a well-done funeral is first of all a reminder of what we all share in common - we, who will one day die, with the dead, who once lived. Funerals remind us that our short and fragile human life is framed by who we have become - by what we have done and by whom we have loved. The funeral of someone who did a lot in life and who loved and was loved by many in return reminds us how truly central our activities and relationships are in defining who we ourselves become (however modest those activities and relationships may seem compared with those who strode visibly on the world stage).

Jon Meacham may have been right - or (much more likely) he may have excessively exaggerated  - in lauding Bush as "America's last great soldier statesman" and a "twentieth-century founding father." Historians will happily debate and contest those claims, and as citizens we are welcome to debate and contest them as well. It is right and proper to eulogize a president for his historical accomplishments, but it is even more important to remember him for his friendships, for the things that ultimately matter most in any human life and which will most make us into who we hope to become forever.

Saint Nicholas Day

For several years, I got to dress up as "Saint Nicholas" at the annual Winter's Eve celebration coinciding with the Lincoln Center Tree Lighting on the Monday after Thanksgiving. (That's a picture of me in my "Saint Nicholas" costume - a kind of generic Bishop outfit, plus a big white beard. As pioneer in the role, I got to design the costume.) I doubt that any who knew me failed tor recognize me, but I don't think that was the point, which was to allow me to retell the story of the real Saint Nicholas (270-343), whose feast the Church celebrates today and whose upcoming Christmas visit - under his now better known identity as "Santa Claus" - countless kids are eagerly awaiting.

The historical Saint Nicholas was a Greek-speaking Christian from Asia Minor (today Turkey), who became bishop of Myra in 317, and attended the Ecumenical Council of Nicea in 325, at which he was one of the signatories of the original Nicene Creed. Legend has it that at that council he punched the heretic Arius in the face! Not quite yet Clement C. Moore's broad face, and a little round belly That shook when he laugh’d, like a bowl full of jelly.

In 1087, Italian sailors stole his relics and brought them to Bari, where they remain, while some of his relics made it to Venice. Hence he is sometimes also venerated as "Saint Nicholas of Bari" as well as his historically correct title, "Saint Nicholas of Myra." Hence he is also the patron saint of sailors. (He is also the patron of Greece and Russia, of bankers, pawnbrokers, perfumers, brides, unmarried women, travelers, fishermen, dockworkers, and brewers.) But most importantly in terms of his long-term influence and secular significance he is also patron saint of children.

Jacobus de Vorqagine's 13th-century Legenda Aurea (The Golden Legend) recounts several famous stories of Saint Nicholas' generous acts of charity, the most famous probably being his anonymously throwing three sums of gold into the house of a man with three daughters, who as a result was now able to provide dowries and arrange good marriages for them. 

Thanks to such stories, Saint Nicholas acquired a reputation for generous gift-giving that continued after his death - often ritualized in coins or gifts put by him in the shoes children had left out for him overnight. From shoes it was not much of a leap to filling stockings hanging on a mantlepiece (or under the Christmas Tree for those of us who grew up in apartments without fireplaces). His modern American name "Santa Claus" clearly comes from the Dutch "Sinterklaas," whose popularity survived the Reformation and came with the Dutch settlers to old New York.

Like almost everything about our commercialized contemporary Christmas, Santa Claus can be dismissed as simply a smiling face camouflaging the rapaciousness of predatory capitalism. That said, and duly acknowledging the damage capitalism and business have done to not just to Christmas but to the climate, the environment, and the prospects for human flourishing on this planet, there remains something immensely inviting about the generous figure of Santa Claus - all that much more so when we recall his saintly origin and the religious roots of his generosity.

So may Santa Claus continue to bring joy to children all over the world, and may the real Saint Nicholas lead them to the true gift-giver, whose birth and generosity in coming to save us ultimately define Christmas! 

We humbly implore your mercy, Lord: protect us in all dangers through the prayers of the Bishop Saint Nicholas, that the way of salvation may lie open before us. (Roman Collect for the feast of Saint Nicholas, Bishop).

President George H.W. Bush

“America is never wholly herself unless she is engaged in high moral principle,” President George H.W. Bush told the crowd at his Inauguration on January 20, 1989. “We as a people have such purpose today. It is to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world.” Can anyone imagine the present President or a member of his political party saying something similar today?

I never voted for either President Bush, and have on occasion observed that, if our first father-son pair of presidents, the Adamses, might cautiously be invoked (in retrospect) as an argument in favor of hereditary monarchy, the same can hardly be said for the second pair. 

But, if the monarchical argument fails, what of the aristocratic one? At the the time of the 1988 election, a former graduate school colleague told me that he had voted for George H.W. Bush because of his background, his (by American standards) aristocratic breeding, and the sense of serious civic responsibility presumed to accompany such a background. Given the malicious "Willie Horton" and "Pledge of Allegiance" campaign against Governor Michael Dukakis, I was personally unpersuaded at the time. 

But no one can doubt that the flip side of American egalitarianism has been a certain appreciation for the virtues of social and civic responsibility that used to be bred into our patrician elites and which have served this country well on multiple occasions - from the two Adamses to the two Roosevelts. Hence, the famous story of Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft's wife's response when asked if her husband was a "common man." "Oh no," she replied. "He was first in his class at Yale and first in his class at Harvard Law School. I think it would be wrong to present a common man as a representative of the people of Oho." 

Like all social arrangements, aristocracy has its genuine and admirable pluses (if also some serious minuses), and undoubtedly President George H.W. Bush exemplified many of those pluses - all the more so in retrospect, when compared with the present President and his political party. Bush embodied that classical combination of traditional, understated patrician modesty with actual accomplishment. He served with distinction in war and in a series of serious political positions, among them Ambassador to the UN, Director of the CIA, and Envoy to China.  An excellent resume only gets one so far in politics, however. Hence, he failed to win his party's presidential nomination in 1980. But his resume undoubtedly helped push him into the vice presidency, from which he went on to accomplish the relatively rare feat of getting elected president directly from the vice presidency in 1988. Since the passage of the 12th Amendment, only Martin VanBuren and George Bush have succeeded at this!

We rate past presidents through the prism of the present - one reason that historians' evaluations of individual presidents keep changing. Undoubtedly, the reputation of our last one-term president is justifiably higher today than at the time of his defeat in 1992.

As president, Bush governed better than many might have expected, and left a legacy more valued in retrospect. Notably, he deftly managed the end of the Cold War and put together an impressive international coalition to undo Saddam Hussein's aggression against Kuwait. In both cases, he showed admirable restraint where others might have swaggered and blustered. Domestically he signed the Americans with Disabilities Act, and his 1990 budget deal helped fix the economic mess he had inherited from Reagan. It was, however, his deviation from the religion of Reaganism, breaking his infamous "no new taxes" campaign promise, that earned him the ire of Republican Reaganite ideologues - a foreshadowing of the incompatibility between traditional responsible governance (on which the patrician elite so prided itself) and the contemporary permanent partisan campaign. It was his misfortune that this coincided with a recession. It was the country's misfortune that his party interpreted his loss because of the recession as instead a repudiation of him for his having broken his earlier "no new taxes" promise.  

As Geoffrey Kabaservice has noted: "Bush lost primarily because he seemed unresponsive to public anger over the economic slowdown and because his campaign veered too far to the right for the liking of an overall moderate electorate. The lesson that most Republicans drew from the election, however, was that Bush had committed political suicide by raising taxes in 1990 and alienating the conservatives who arguably comprised the party's base." [Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party (Oxford U. Pr. 2012), pp. 374-375].

The historical consequences for the Republican party have been a straight line to where it is today.  As a society, we have witnessed - and been accomplices in -  what Peter Baker in last Sunday’s NY Times fittingly called. “the fading of an approach to public life overtaken by the politics of anger, grievance and polarization.”

Like John Adams, Bush left office unpopular, but lived long enough to be appreciated for the larger story of his life. His post-presidency saw him team up with the man who had defeated him. When he and Bill Clinton partnered to do good together, he famously explained, "Politics does not have to be mean and ugly" - a stereotypically gentlemanly, aristocratic sentiment if ever there was one!

Since Plato, aristocratically oriented political thinkers have warned against the dangers of democracy, in particular democracy's power to produce - and reward - rulers like Trump. More than nostalgia is needed to reverse course, however, if indeed the course can be reversed at this point. Patrician civic mindedness presupposes all sorts of social structures and institutions (among them strong family structures and elite educational institutions), the weakening of which has exacted a heavy toll from our society. More has been lost than just good manners, and more will be required than merely relearning some good manners (although that obviously would be a good place to start). The fact is that good manners do not and by themselves cannot create a healthy civic culture.  Rather good manners are themselves a product of such a culture. 

Neither, however, should it be forgotten that the first President Bush was not just an elite, Yale-educated, Senator's son. He was also a veteran of combat in World War II - something he shared with so many of his generation, an experience which created a national community of shared values across class and other obvious divisions. Bush was the last "Greatest Generation" President. With him passes one of our last links to the sense of unified national purpose that not only led to victory in war but also set a distinctive tone to the post-war period - a period of some 20 years of steadfast progress on almost all fronts. It is not just Bush's patrician manners and sense of noblesse oblige that we may miss. It is also that shared sense of national unity and common purpose, forged in war and central to the post-war world, that we now so desperately miss even more.

Bush famously called for "a kinder, gentler America" - "kinder" and "gentler" presumably than the direction the country had been headed since 1980, "kinder" and "gentler" by far than the direction his political party has taken our country since then. Ultimately, however, kindness and gentleness are not primarily political virtues but human ones. Politics cannot make us "kinder" or "gentler." Rather, it is kindness and gentleness in people that can transform our politics. In his personal and family life, Bush exemplified some of those qualities, those pre-political virtues, that our obsessive politics needs but so tragically seems to lack today. The virtues of his personal and family life were perhaps best exemplified in his 73-year marriage. I can think of few more admirable lessons his life leaves us with than that of his marriage - such an antidote to the tragically diminished position of marriage in the experience and expectations of subsequent generations. 

And he wrote letters - real letters, by hand! In the wake of his death, attention is being paid to his wonderful final letter as president, left in the Oval office for the man who had defeated him, Bill Clinton. It is a fine letter, well worth quoting. So is another letter sent to one of his granddaughters some two decades ago: “I believe I was right when I said, as president, there can be no definition of a successful life that does not include service to others,” Bush wrote. “So I do that now, and I gain happiness."

And that sums up the seriousness of that generation and the ensuing happiness that now so painfully eludes contemporary America!

Photo: Former President George H.W. Bush with former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barak Obama, and Hilary Clinton, Laura bush, Michelle Obama, and Melania Trump, at the funeral for former First-Lady Barbara Bush earlier this year.

Advent

One of the constants in human – and especially American - history has been the periodic appearance of movements and people preparing for some sort of impending calamity, real or imagined, including even the end of the world. Usually they are fringe groups at the margin of mainstream society, although sometimes such anxieties are more reality-based and more widely shared. I think back, for example, to the fallout shelter movement in the early 1960s, which was actively promoted in New York where I lived by no less mainstream a person than Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and which was also taken seriously and discussed within the Kennedy Administration, as well as in the pages of the weekly Jesuit magazine America.

A few years ago, I was watching a TV interview with someone who was stocking up on supplies in anticipation of the cosmic calamities predicted to occur at the end of 2012. What struck me most at the time was how both the one being interviewed and the one doing the interview kept referring to the imminent disaster as “the end of the world.” Well, obviously, if you are stocking up on supplies, then you must expect – or at least hope - to survive the disaster, in which case, whatever else it may be, it is not quite “the end of the world.”

One could, of course, talk that way and mean not total destruction or even the end of all human life on earth. One could mean just the end of civilization as we know it, which is often what disaster scenarios are actually about. Apparently an actual end of the world may be more than even disaster-fans really care to contemplate. Add to that scary scenario the prospect of divine judgment, and then we’re getting into some really seriously scary stuff! So it is no surprise that the early Christians prayed, in Tertullian’s famous phrase: “for Emperors, their ministers, for the condition of the world, for peace everywhere, and for the delaying of the end.”

To us today, living in a world that is at least as dangerous and disorderly as that of the early Christians, if not more so, and where we hear right away about every terrible thing that happens almost anywhere in the world, to us that sounds like a familiar enough list – except for the final petition, which we seldom give much thought to, even while we pray every day at Mass for the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ.  Yet that “end” is precisely what the Church calls on us to contemplate today, as indeed we do every Advent.

Dies irae, dies illa, solvet saeclum in favilla: teste David cum Sibylla. O day of wrath, O dreadful day, when heaven and earth shall pass away, as David and the Sibyl say. So begins one of the most famous medieval liturgical hymns, composed by one of the early Franciscans in the 13th century.  When I was young, before our feel-good therapeutic culture took over and ruined funerals with eulogies and feel-good songs, those somber words of that medieval hymn were sung at every Catholic funeral. Actually, however, the Dies Irae began its life as an Advent hymn. Advent acknowledges the fear that people have always felt about what lies ahead. As Jesus himself said in today’s Gospel, People will die of fright in anticipation of what is coming upon the world. [Luke 21:26].

Advent originated, after all, as an annual period of repentance focused on preparation for Judgment Day, and the Dies Irae’s somber sentiments served to concentrate people’s attention on Christ's final coming at the end of time as judge of all the world.

Recent events have highlighted how dangerous our world is. We hardly need Advent to warn us of what is coming upon the world. Advent, however, is also about hope, a hope that comes from our memory, the lesson learned from Christ’s first coming into our world, two millennia ago. And the same Jesus who assumed our human nature and became part of our world, himself has invited us to look forward to his final coming with hope, telling us when these signs begin to happen, stand erect and raise your heads because your redemption is at hand.

Actually, Advent is about both fear and hope – both the end of this world and the coming of God’s kingdom, both the passing of another year and our hopes for a new and better one, both the darkness of our world and the living light of Christ coming again to make everything bright and new,

That, of course, is why we don’t celebrate Christmas in June, when the sun is high and the days are bright. We celebrate it now, when the days are dark and the nights are long, when we must search in the darkness to recognize the bright light of God’s kingdom coming into our world. In the dark winter night, full of fear, danger, doubt, and anxiety – in the long night of the present – between Christ’s first coming and his hoped for final advent, Jesus bids us: Be vigilant.

There is plenty of darkness to go around, and there is certainly plenty to worry about this year – as in every year.  . We all have our painful memories of personal failures, lost opportunities, unfulfilled longings, and ruptured relationships - all of which seem to haunt us even more intensely at this time of year. And then there is the worldwide darkness of our anxious, conflicted, war-ravaged time. Jesus was born in an anxious and conflict-filled world. He himself was born homeless and spent part of his childhood as a political refugee. Then as now, people were on the lookout for something or someone - in their case, so they hoped, the Emperor Augustus - that could make things right, or at least make a difference. Then as now, such pagan solutions proved temporary stopgaps at best, illusions at worst. Not for nothing did the psalmist pray: put not your trust in princes, in mortal men in whom there is no salvation [Psalm 146:3]. In the midst of so much darkness, Advent challenges us to recognize God's solution - the coming of Christ bringing light into anxious lives and a worried world.

In the words of the Paulist Fathers’ founder, Servant of God Isaac Hecker, the bicentennial of whose birth we will be commemorating throughout the coming year: There is little or no hope at all of our entering into the kingdom of heaven hereafter, if we are not citizens of it here. If Christ is to be to us a savior, we must find him here, now, and where we are; other wise he is no Christ, no Saviour, no Immanuel, no “God with us” [Questions of the Soul, 1855].

Advent is our annual, winter wake-up call to face up to our responsibility to live our lives like people whose God really has come. And, if God’s coming into our world means anything at all, it has to mean a change so thorough that nothing should ever be the same again.

Homily for the 1st Sunday of Advent, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, December 2, 2018.