On Eagles' Wings

What a difference four years make! Exactly four years ago today, America awoke to discover that we had somehow elected as our president a notorious, outer-borough businessman noted for his bankruptcies and divorces. He did, however, have a very good sense of the national mood and had successfully engaged and played upon the alienation and resentment so many Americans were feeling, especially after the 2008 financial crisis. That calamity, as Pope Francis recently recalled in his encyclical Fratelli Tutti, was a tragically missed opportunity for fundamental change. Instead it “increased freedom for the truly powerful, who always find a way to escape unscathed.” Donald Trump saw that alienation and anger in so much of America (admittedly all hiding in plain sight) and exploited it to win the presidency, throwing out the Republican "conservative" agenda, which was all about making the rich richer at everyone else's expense, and instead embraced a vague but powerful "populist" position.

It is plausible that, had he actually governed as a "populist," he might be heading into a second term today. Instead uninterested in actually governing, he outsourced his policy agenda to the Republican party elite, people like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and their colleagues, who cared mainly about tax cuts for the already overly rich, taking away people's access to health care coverage, shredding what is left of the social safety net, and appointing Republican business-friendly judges. This was the same unpopular Republican establishment that had been rejected in the Republican primaries that led to Trump's nomination! Trump meanwhile focused more and more on racial, religious, and cultural grievance politics - to the delight of his populist "base," which reveled in his performative authoritarianism, cruelty, and contempt for constitutional norms, but which got no tangible benefits in return. With the passage of time, Trump, reverting ever more to type, focused more and more on his own personal grievances to the exclusion of almost anything else. Add to that the pandemic, which he refused to address seriously and which he politicized appallingly, resulting in the world's worst casualty rate.

One of the traditional tropes of classical political theory has been the decline of constitutional government into rule by a demagogue tyrant. For four years, President Trump and his Republican party enablers pushed the country closer and closer to the brink. From that brink the American people themselves, roused to vote in unprecedented numbers, have suddenly pulled us back. Saving constitutional government from its deliberate destruction is no minor accomplishment, and it is also a prerequisite for any further political accomplishments.

It also didn't hurt - and almost certainly helped - that Biden basically ignored the so-called "culture war" in his campaign and completely ignored it in his post-election victory speech. There is a moral in that too, likewise hiding in plain sight, if only the culture warriors on both sides would notice!

It is widely assumed that Joe Biden will not seek re-election in 2024. Rather than thinking of himself as a helpless lame-duck, however, he may feel liberated by this and focus his energies on actual accomplishments. Our political culture considers re-election a president's primary accomplishment, but his party will have a better chance in 2022 and 2024 if he has more concrete accomplishments to point to. What the Democratic party needs to be doing in the meantime is aggressive and intense party-building at the local level, something it seemed to have ignored during the previous Democratic presidency..

Of course, the impediments to accomplishment remain many, mostly coming from the opposition party's hold on power.

One way of looking at the election results would be to see the prospect of a renewed Republican party gradually self-transforming into a multi-racial, multi-ethnic working-class party. There is indeed that possibility. But there remain two obvious obstacles. The first, of course, is the continued persistence and probably prevalence of racist and nativist white grievance politics as the symbolic face of the party for the foreseeable future - at least as long as those who have profited from fostering it remain on the scene.

The second is the continued presence and power of the Republican party establishment in Congress and the judiciary. Their reverse Robin Hood ideology of taking from the poor and giving to the rich will likely reassert itself in a rediscovered commitment to fiscal austerity, which will hobble the Biden Administration's attempts to enact most useful legislation.

For all its awesome majesty and despite the new president's popular mandate, the American presidency can be an amazingly weak office. In his 1960 classic, Presidential Power, Richard Neustadt famously said "Presidential power is the power to persuade." If that was true then, at the zenith of 20th-century bi-partisan comity, then persuasion and bargaining are, if anything, more of a challenge today, when so few people are persuadable. 

Our antiquated and overly admired arrangement of checks and balances biases the system toward inaction. In today's hyper-polarized politics, an opposition party in control of Congress has few incentives to cooperate and compromise. If anyone can bridge this gap, Joe Biden, a traditional man of the Senate, is that one. His task, for which he is temperamentally and experientially well suited, will be to craft policy proposals and argue for them in a way which ordinary people can hear and comprehend. The challenge will be to find enough people who are actually willing to hear anything he says.

Fittingly, in this time which has seen so much unnecessary suffering, President-Elect Biden ended his post-election victory speech by inviting us to let ourselves be lifted beyond ourselves and our precarious present, meditating on the familiar words of the contemporary Catholic hymn, which so many Evangelicals also sing: And he will raise you up on eagles' wings, Bear you on the breath of dawn, Make you to shine just like the sun, And hold you in the palm of his hand.

No One Else to Blame

Every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we say Thy kingdom come; and at Mass we conclude the Lord’s Prayer with the words as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ).

Yet I think it is safe to suggest that, despite what we say in our prayers and despite the obvious importance of the topic, most of us, most of the time, don’t expend a lot of energy thinking about Christ’s coming again. The exception, of course, is those who do think about it, and maybe think much too much about it, as happens with those who think that the Lord’s coming can be predicted precisely, especially in relation to events occurring in the world American religious history has been full of such expectations and the movements they gave rise to, a chronic misuse of scripture to fit what happens in the world - both natural and humanly caused catastrophes and both welcome and unwelcome political events - into convenient categories that serve our immediate interests.

Now, of course, there is really not a lot that is new about all this. It is obvious from Saint Paul’s 1^st letter to the Thessalonians, from which we just heard [4:13-18], that Paul’s 1^st-century audience also apparently expected Christ’s coming to occur soon – and so were worried whether those who died in the interim would miss out on something. And Paul himself, while telling the Thessalonians not to worry about that, sounded as if he also probably expected it to happen soon - and may even have expected to be there himself, as he says, to meet the Lord in the air.

Meanwhile in today’s Gospel [Matthew 25:1-13], Jesus seems to be addressing this subject simultaneously to two different groups, covering all the bases, so to speak. To those who think that the Lord’s coming can be predicted, he says you know neither the day nor the hour. Jesus says this at the end of a parable about a wedding feast – a standard symbol in both the Old and the New Testaments for the coming of God’s kingdom – but a wedding for which the bridegroom was long delayed.

On the other hand, to those among us who might not be sufficiently concerned about the Lord’s coming, perhaps precisely because his coming has been so long delayed, Jesus cites the case of the five foolish virgins, who brought no oil with them, when taking their lamps; and so, when the bridegroom finally did arrive, they found the door to the wedding feast locked shut, leaving them outside.

At an ordinary wedding in Jesus’ time, the bridesmaids would have waited with the bride at her house for the bridegroom to come and lead her to his home. But the coming of the kingdom doesn’t follow the ready-made script of an ordinary wedding. Hence, the delay.

As Christians over the centuries have eventually come to understand, the delay has turned out to be a lot longer than was originally expected. Like the bridesmaids in the parable, it is only natural for us to settle down for the long haul, to make ourselves comfortable in the here and now. And the here and now has become very comfortable indeed for far too many of us, dangerously comfortable for far too many of us, especially in this country. But sooner or later the call will come: “Behold the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!” And when the call comes, then, like the five wise virgins, we must be ready. Each one of us individually must be ready.

In an age when taking responsibility for one’s life and one’s actions seems increasingly out of fashion and blaming others is the order of the day, the obvious question comes up: why not get some oil from the wise virgins? Why couldn’t the wise virgins share some of their oil? The most jarring thing about this parable may be the fact that, when the kingdom comes, there will be no one else to pin the blame on, if my own inattention and irresponsibly have let the lamp of goodness go out. When the time comes, each one of us must be ready to meet the Lord, my way lit with the lamp of what good I have made of my life.

Homily for the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, November 8, 2020. The entire Mas may be watched at: 

https://www.facebook.com/128972640480016/videos/834980563929650

"Put Not Your Trust in Princes"

Given the polls and predictions prior to the election, millions of jubilant Democrats might well have expected to channel the Duke of Gloucester (through the imagination and pen of Shakespeare) at the accession of his brother England's King Edward IV: Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this sun of Scranton.  Shakespeare's famous metaphor about a sun of York might still be so adapted today in the imagination of many millions of relieved Democrats. But relieved rather than jubilant may be now the right word. Had Joe Biden's election been clear on Tuesday night or Wednesday morning and had it conformed more to the pre-election polls and predictions, and (much more important) carried with it a Democratic Senate, certainly there would have been jubilation for many, who now must settle for mere relief. Even so, relief remains better than despair!

It won't be official, of course, until the electors vote on December 14 and their votes are counted by Congress on January 6. It appears, however, that Biden has won the presidency with at least 273 electoral votes to Trump's 214 (with several states and their electoral votes yet to be called). In the popular vote, as of this morning, Biden won 50.6% of the popular vote (74,819,484), compared to 47.7%  for Trump (70,561,283). That is more votes than any other candidate in American history. This also means that the Democrats have now won the most votes in seven of the past eight presidential elections, the first time any political party has accomplished that in American history. In its own terms, that is quite an accomplishment, although it is still not quite enough in our dysfunctional political and constitutional system to make much of a difference in our politics. 

So once again (even more decisively than last time) a majority of voters have voted against Trump. And this time they were successful. Trump will soon be evicted from the White House, and the country's second Catholic President will move in. Yet, while the Democrats did a credible job of motivating and turning out an energized "base," so did the Republicans who may even have enlarged theirs. Thus this was not quite the "persuasion election" that some had been predicting (or, more likely, just hoping for). On the contrary, this election, like the last one (but even more so), reveals an America almost evenly divided, an increasingly Disunited States, in which the political cleavage increasingly coincides with geographical and cultural cleavages, creating a dysfunctional polity in which each side largely defines itself in terms of its hatred and fear of the other.

More than anything else, Biden, without actually using Warren Harding's famous phrase from 100 years ago, has seemed to promise a return to normalcy - highlighting and opposing especially those aspects of the Trump presidency that made it so abnormal and so uniquely frightening to so many these past four terrifying years. In that President-Elect Biden will personally behave differently from President Trump and will conduct himself more according to the law and conventional norms, in that he will try to unite the country President Trump set out deliberately to divide, that may prove to be his main legacy. Liberating the land from some of the particular pathologies that have so seriously aggrieved it these past four years is in itself an accomplishment.

Yet, as has been pointed out so often by so many, Trump's rise to power in the first place was possible precisely because the old political "normal" had already failed for so many alienated Americans, who felt left behind, left out, passed by, ignored, and looked down upon as "deplorables" by their globalist, cosmopolitan, coastal betters, and so have turned for reassurance and satisfaction to a demagogue who provided them no tangible benefits but compensated by skillfully spreading hatred and Nietzschean resentiment. Sadly, even if the deliberately divisive demagogue will be gone from the White House, little else has happened, and little is likely to happen, to overcome those deep divisions in our society.

I Moreover, for President-Elect Biden and the incoming Democratic Administration to accomplish much of anything substantive (including much needed electoral and voting rights reforms) would have required a Democratic victory of sufficient dimensions to have both definitively repudiated Trump and won control of both houses of Congress. As it is, with the Senate still almost certainly in Republican hands, we can expect Mitch McConnell to oppose any and all initiatives from the new Administration. While Biden may still be personally nostalgic for the good-old-days of bi-partisan cooperation, we must expect from the Republicans more Obama-era obstruction, gridlock, and inaction, which will further alienate voters and thus make Democratic losses in 2022 and 2024 even that much more likely. Biden will presumably be somewhat successful in improving the U.S. response to the covid calamity (an obvious priority). Beyond that, he will probably do as other lame-duck presidents without complete control of Congress have done - seek success abroad. Rebuilding our alliances, restoring trust in America around the world, returning to the Paris climate accord and the JCPOA would all be eminently worthy accomplishments. But they will not heal America's broken heart. 

nInevitably, there needs to be some serious soul-searching in the aftermath of this election on the part of the Democrats who missed an opportunity to make more inroads where predicted. Now may be the time to discard simplistic models of demographic change (to appreciate, for example, the diversity of Latinos and Latinas, who transcend the ideological construct of "Latinx"). It is time to relearn that other people exist outside one's own social and information bubble, and that acquiring political power is predicated on persuasion and coalition-forming. This should be a challenge for the more extreme wing of the party to reflect upon how demonstrably out of touch it continues to be with so many otherwise potentially receptive voters. 

 May it also be an occasion for reflection for those on the other side - such as the so-called "Religious Right" - who seem to have forgotten the words of the psalmist, Put not your trust in princes (Psalm 146:3), and have allied themselves with Trump and his political party in the vain pursuit of earthly political power, a devil's bargain that may unhappily boomerang and haunt the Churches going forward.

I

A Very Different Election Day

When I was in school, Election Day was always a holiday. Of course, not everyone had the day off, but my father did. And schools were closed, obviously, since they were the main polling places. Sixty years ago, I spent part of Election Day 1960 walking through the park with my father. Where we were headed or why, I have no memory. But I do clearly remember walking through the park with my father that crisp autumn day and talking a little about the election. The Kennedy-Nixon contest was the first presidential campaign in which I took any active interest. Kennedy himself had made a campaign speech a few blocks from our home. (In those days, New York was the largest state, with the most electoral votes, which could go either way, what we would nowadays call a "swing state.") The blue-collar character of the neighborhood and our common Catholic faith gave Kennedy and the Democrats a decisive edge in my neighborhood. But even there, both candidates had significant support. The outcome was far from certain when my father and I calmly walked through the park. Nor was it yet certain when I went to bed that night.

It was actually at 5:35 the next morning, according to Theodore H. White's famous account (The Making of the President 1960), that the Director of the Secret Service, watching in Washington, DC, noted that TV was awarding Michigan's electoral votes to Kennedy, enough to make him the president-elect. Minutes later, he telephoned the waiting Secret Service detail to establish security at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, MA. It was, in White's words, "what little official ceremony election night offered." A little later, I awakened to see Kennedy's picture on the cover of The NY Daily News on the news stand below our apartment's window (photo). The News had endorsed Nixon, but its post-election editorial praised the outcome for dropping what it poetically called a 'hydrogen bomb" on the tradition that a Catholic could not be elected president.

The 1960 election had the highest voter turnout of any election in my lifetime - 62.8% (the highest since 1908's 65.4%, and way higher than 2016's mere 55.5%). Growing up, I watched my parents and other adults vote and wished that I too could go behind that curtain and move those little levers on the voting machine and so register my preference for who should be in charge. I wanted it enough that in 1969 I symbolically celebrated reaching voting age by registering to vote on my 21st birthday. Laziness, the challenge of voting absentee while living in a foreign country, and indifference as a new resident to local contests occasionally caused me not to vote. Yet the larger lesson impressed on me at home and in school - that voting is a civic obligation, part of what it means to be a citizen, and that it is a precious opportunity earned for me by previous generations - generally has prevailed, and I have voted most of the time, even in those elections when I  fully expected my preferred candidate to lose.

So I have always been somewhat appalled both by the self-righteous virtue-signaling of third-party voters and by the socially and culturally corrosive cynicism of those who do not value the responsibilities of citizenship enough to vote at all, or who foolishly think that not voting somehow "sends a message." The only message it sends is that those who already have power can confidently continue to ignore the interests of those who don't vote and so hold onto their power unaccountable to citizens - in other words, an oligarchy. That our present system so increasingly resembles an oligarchy is in part a reflection of our notoriously low voter turnout. In contrast, other ostensible democracies all have higher voter turnouts. Not coincidentally, those other ostensible democracies encourage - even in some cases mandate - voting.

As everyone knows, the 1960 election was extremely close. Kennedy won 49.7% of the popular vote to Nixon's 49.6%. (It was 303 to 219 in the Electoral College.) Yet, like Election Day itself, the aftermath was largely calm. Some were elated, some disappointed, but no one thought that the Republic was in danger. No one worried about an imminent apocalypse. Nor would those reactions have been different if Nixon had been elected. We were a very different kind of country then - less intense about our disagreements, more conscious of what we had in common.

Nixon had run on experience and continuity. Kennedy, although only four years younger than Nixon and equally part of the same "Greatest Generation," projected novelty and what Theodore White called "a sense of purpose." Kennedy, White wrote, "spoke to a peaceful and prosperous people in the year 1960, a people for whom the crises of swelling problems lay still unclear years ahead. He insisted that they must move to meet those obscure crises—which he did not define—and urged them to give into his untested hands the greatest of all crises, war and peace, without ever telling them how he meant to meet it. It was on this above all that he won—a sense of purpose."

For all that, the sense was still one of continuity. The two 40-something World War II vets who competed for the presidency shared a common worldview, forged from the firestorm of global war, and widely shared by the World War II generation they represented. The consensus was considerable. My father and my father's boss, who lived on Fifth Avenue, obviously lived very differently; but my guess is that their basic outlook on life and their values were more similar than different.

How different the country and the candidates this contentious Election Day! The two septuagenarian pre-Boomers running this year were part of that "peaceful and prosperous people" Kennedy and Nixon both spoke to in 1960. They were formed by that peace and prosperity, and,  in wildly different, quite contrasting ways, both look back to that era, even as the torch is passing again to a waiting post-boomer generation that has known neither peace nor prosperity.

Very much a man of his generation, Kennedy's Catholicism, which caused so much angst among American Protestants, was actually very matter-of-fact. It was part of who he was, his history and heritage, but peripheral to what he proposed to be and do as president.  Kennedy, who never set foot in a Catholic school, saw nuns as his supporters. Biden, this year's Catholic candidate, experienced them as his teachers.  Pre-boomer Biden, who in generational terms has had to define both the man he is and the president he would be through those "still unclear years ahead," wears his religious identity much more comfortably, as an accessible consolation in a new era when politics seems bereft of any sense of purpose but when we increasingly turn to politics for the consolation of identity the world once sought in religion.

All Saints Day

 

This past June was the 55th anniversary of my high school graduation. When 2020 began I was hoping for another reunion. Whether or not there would otherwise have been one, the pandemic took care of that. Our last one was for our 50th five years ago. 50 years is a long time! Thank God for nametags, or I might not have recognized most of those there! I envy those of you Knoxville Catholic grads who still see each other regularly!

It really has been a long time since my classmates and I last left our high school – and, for most of us, each other - behind.  The High School itself closed in 1991. Built as an expression of American post-war prosperity and confidence, as well as the zeal and enthusiasm of the mid-century American Catholic Church, its closure was a casualty of the loss of so much of that zeal and enthusiasm, rooted in a collapse of our cultural confidence.

Our reunion, however, was not an occasion for such somber thoughts. Rather it was a celebration of one another and of the memories we share from a world long gone. Because ours was very much a neighborhood school, many of us enjoyed a connectedness with one another and with one another's families that preceded high school and in some cases perdured.  Meanwhile, we have all gone our various separate ways, along the paths life has taken us.

As for those classmates who are no longer with us, whose earthly labors have already ended, may they rest in peace, and may we all come together again at the greatest reunion of all in the kingdom of heaven!

It is that great reunion which today’s 1st Reading [Revelation 7:2-4, 9-14] portrays and today’s solemnity of All Saints’ Day celebrates.

In November 1887, the Paulist Fathers’ founder, Servant of God Isaac Hecker, wrote in the Paulist magazine, The Catholic World: “When, in 1843, I first read in the catechism of the Council of Trent the doctrine of the communion of saints, it went right home. It alone was to me a heavier weight on the Catholic side of the scales than the best historical argument which could be presented.”      

The doctrine of the communion of saints had had a decisive effect upon young Isaac Hecker’s spiritual search, and apparently the passage of 44 years had done little to dull its impact. Appropriately so! What would we be without the communion of saints?

For one thing, church would certainly be a duller place! Just look around! Over there is the martyr Saint George in his knightly armor ready to slay a dragon for Jesus. Across the aisle is another ancient martyr, the Egyptian philosopher Saint Catherine of Alexandria.  At this end stands Saint Bridget, a 14th-century Swedish princess, a mystic who is now co-patroness of Europe, a wife and mother of 8 children who became a nun and founded an order of nuns (who nowadays even have an Anglican branch). Across the way is Saint Teresa, another mystic and religious founder, and a Doctor of the Church. Farther down this side stands Saint Patrick the great missionary Bishop and Apostle of Ireland, who obeyed Jesus’ command to go and make disciples, even if that meant going beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire. And across the aisle is another bishop, whose name we don’t even know. My guess is that the glass with his name must have been broken at some point and was replaced with plain glass, rendering him forever anonymous – a fitting surrogate for all those saints we especially remember today whose names are known to God alone.

The communion of saints transcends time, uniting past and present. It permeates the Church’s worship and punctuates the calendar, culminating in this great annual celebration in honor of all the Saints – not just those officially recognized by the Church, but all the holy men and women, known and unknown, who have already attained the goal for which we still strive. Living now with God and praising him forever in heaven, the saints intercede for us, uniting their prayers with ours, imitating Jesus, our Risen Lord who lives forever to intercede for us [Hebrews 7:24-25]. Our celebration of the saints signifies our communion with the triumphant Church in heaven, and reminds us of the Church’s mission to mirror (however imperfectly) that heavenly community of angels and saints, and so transform the world - with love and forgiveness - according to the hope that is Christ’s great gift to his Church and the Church’s gift to the world.

As one of the seasonal turning points in the ancient northern European calendar, November 1 was the beginning not only of winter but of a new year, the eve of which was a frightening in-between time when the spirits of the dead were thought to roam about and try to haunt their old homes.  The celebration of all the Saints on November 1 represented the Christianization of that old seasonal holiday - a celebration of Christianity’s triumph over paganism and of Christ’s victory (as exemplified in the saints) over the demonic forces, which had hitherto held people in fear.

Deliberately celebrated on the day after Halloween, All Saints Day celebrates the hope that replaces fear, exemplified in the lives of the saints and experienced by us in our continued communion with them – a communion which challenges that great opponent of human hope, death, by connecting us not only with the saints already in heaven but with all who have gone before us with the sign of faith. 

Remembering is a uniquely and fundamentally human activity. To remember those who have died is to acknowledge the importance of their lives - and the common humanity we share with them. To remember those who have gone before us in faith is to celebrate the different ways in which the grace of God touched and transformed each one of them - and to affirm the hope that we share with them.

For this reason, as a sequel to All Saints’ Day, tomorrow the Church celebrates All Souls’ Day. We pray tomorrow that all who have died in God’s grace and are now being purified from the consequences of their sins may be admitted to the fullness of his kingdom – there to join the saints already in glory. Our prayers to the saints to intercede on our behalf, together our own intercessory prayers for one another and on behalf of the faithful departed, express our ongoing participation in that great eternal community in which hope is fulfilled in love and sin succumbs forever to forgiveness.

Homily for All Saints Day, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN November 1, 2020.

Photo: The Communion of Saints: The Souls in Purgatory Being Set Free by the Intercession of Saint Nicholas of Tolentine, Saint Nicholas of Tolentine Church, Bronx, NY.