Great Joy in the City

Our newest Paulist priest, having been ordained just yesterday, celebrated his First Mass this morning at St. Paul the Apostle Church. It's always a joy to be back in our community's "Mother Church," to return to the altar where I celebrated and concelebrated so many Masses during my 10 years as associate pastor, but especially to be back for such a joyful occasion as we celebrated there this morning.

Particularly to the point on this 6th Sunday of Easter, it seemed to me, was the first reading at Mass. It recounted the famous story of Philip’s evangelizing mission in Samaria and the response this produced from the Mother Church in Jerusalem (Acts 8:5-8, 14-17).

The Samaritans were, so to speak, next-door neighbors to the Jews. Neighbors, however, don’t always get along, as we all know, and as the unhappy history of the Holy Land has repeatedly reminded us. The Samaritans were ethnically and religiously related to the Jews; but over the centuries, thanks to their complicated history, they had acquired a separate identity. The result was two distinct groups, which certainly saw themselves as worshiping the same God, but nonetheless regarded each other with hostility. (Nothing either new or ancient about any of that!)

Yet none of that seems to have deterred Philip, who proclaimed the Christ to them. Nor did it prevent those Samaritans from paying attention to what was said by Philip. The result was great joy in that city and yet another leap on the Church’s part, another experience of expansion, growth, and diversity - in keeping with the whole trajectory of the story of the early church in the Acts of the Apostles which, can be summarized as: Good News travels far to build the Church and heal the world.

Even so, there inevitably were some serious questions raised back in Jerusalem about what Philip was doing. So Peter and John went to see for themselves what was happening and to interpret what it meant. Surrounded by Samaritans, whom they would have probably tried to avoid until recently, Peter and John laid their hands on them and they received the Holy Spirit. There is only one Holy Spirit. If the Samaritans were going to become believers, they had to be united with the Church led by the apostles.

Luke’s point in telling this story seems to be to stress the importance of the unity and universality of the Church, specifically its apostolic leadership, which links us with the Risen Christ, through his gift of the Holy Spirit, through whom the Church continues Christ’s presence and action in our world. (Hence our particular Latin tradition of emphasizing the role of the Bishop, as a successor of the apostles, in the sacrament of Confirmation.)

The apostles may well have been surprised initially, both by Philip’s initiative and by the Samaritans’ ready response. Surprised or not, they saw in what was happening the direction they were intended to go. Acts constantly presents the Church as learning from her experiences, confident that, thanks to the Risen Christ’s continued presence in the Church through his Holy Spirit, what happens in the world really is significant.

Faith does not eradicate the differences that exist among peoples, but it does create a new relationship for all of us with God and with one another - in Christ through the Holy Spirit.  Peter, John, and Philip all learned this from their actual experience of how God was acting among different peoples.

Likewise, faith alone does not resolve all the problems we will experience in our life together as Christ’s Church. It does, however, give us confidence in the Risen Lord’s presence among us in the structures of his Church - in the successor of the apostles in union with the successor of Peter - and in the power of the word of God, which continues to be proclaimed in the Church, to create a unity which transcends our human divisions and limitations.

What a wonderful message any Sunday, but especially on this Sunday when the Holy Father himself is on pilgrimage in the perennially conflicted and divided Holy Land! And what an apt message for us Paulists on this Sunday when we are especially celebrating our priestly ministry and life together with the First Mass of a newly ordained priest!

As We Gathered at the River

Friday afternoon at the Paulist Motherhouse in New York City, the 2014 Paulist General Assembly was called to order by the outgoing President.  After the formal preliminaries of seating the delegates and ascertaining the presence of a quorum to do business, the outgoing President gave his final Presidential Report to the community and then handed the gavel over to the new President.  

Later that day, a beautiful Installation installation in the Paulist Mother Church was celebrated, at which we concelebrating Paulists all renewed our promises and the new President was invested with Servant of God Isaac Hecker’s Mission Cross. The fact that our new President is himself a New Yorker (albeit originally from Dutchess County) and is still fondly remembered at St. Paul's from his first priestly assignment there gave the event an added dimension of local festivity. We began by singing Shall We Gather at the River, evoking the the special significance of the Hudson River in the new President's own life and in the history of our foundational Paulist parish. And later in the same Mass we sang In the Breaking of the Bread, an Easter hymn very dear to me from my own decade as associate pastor at that parish.

Following the Mass, a marvelous reception was held in auditorium organized by the parish staff, followed by a Paulist dinner at which we honored our  Golden and Silver Jubilarians and the new President officially announced the new community assignments. I can now confirm that I will be continuing as Pastor at Immaculate Conception Church in Knoxville and will also become the Superior of the local Paulist community.

Today was another happy day as we celebrated the ordination of our brother Jimmy Hsu to the priesthood. As MC for the ceremony, I was necessarily preoccupied with many ritual and ceremonial details that such a celebration entails, but never too preoccupied to be moved as I always am by the grace of the priesthood and the special bond of religious community life. 

Tomorrow, Father Jimmy will celebrate his First Solemn Mass at the Mother Church. Then it is Amtrak to Washington, DC, for the continuation of the Assembly. This is my first time ever as a delegate to such an event, and I look forward to being part of the process of responding as a religious community to the challenges of the New Evangelization to which the Church is being called in this dramatic era.

Graduation Day

Today was Graduation Day at our regional Catholic School. I celebrated Mass this morning for the graduates and their families, as well as for the other grades who will be returning next year. At the actual Commencement Exercises this evening, I was privileged to present the annual Servant of God Isaac Hecker Prize, which is awarded to the graduating 8th grader who writes the best essay on how being a faithful Catholic can contribute to making a person a better citizen and the United States a better country.

My own 8th-grade graduation occurred almost 53 years ago - on June 25, 1961. That was another world in so many ways, but in essence the experience of graduation remains much the same. One set of experiences and relationships comes to an end, and newer and more varied future experiences and relationships are promised. Hopefully, one can build on the knowledge one has acquired, the friendships one has formed, and the experiences one has had to prepare oneself for the next set of challenges. But, however much looking backward may seem to be the essence of any graduation, it is what lies ahead that matters. After all, however formative my grade-school years may have been (and they were in significant respects), almost all of my life has passed since that long-ago graduation. 

I used the Votive Mass of Thanksgiving this morning. That's an obviously appropriate choice for graduation day, although if there were a specific Votive Mass for getting ready to face new and a yet undefined challenges, I think that might be at least as appropriate, maybe more so!

Today's 1st reading at Mass (Acts 15:7-21) recalls the Council of Jerusalem. In the context of graduation day, one of the things I find most striking - and inspiring - about the Council of Jerusalem story is how, despite the unprecedented challenge they were facing, the leaders of the apostolic Church had confidence in the Risen Lord's continued presence in the Church and hence had confidence in their ability as a community to resolve the complex issue they faced. My hope for this year's graduates is that the experiences and relationships they have had thus far (and will hopefully be able to build upon in the coming years) will help them likewise continually throughout their lives to recognize the presence and action of the Risen Lord in our life together as his Church and thus also feel confidence like that of  the apostles in Acts.

The Great Society at 50

Contemporary commencement speeches seldom get the attention such speeches often got in the not-so-distant past. If they do get any attention today it is actually more likely because of some controversy about the choice of speaker - such events having become yet one more occasion for personal outrage and political posturing among competing elites. The notion that great universities provide a setting for the public articulation of major policy initiatives seems largely to have gone the way of the even older notion of universities as a setting for great ideas.

Fifty years ago, however, statesmen still spoke serious words when invited to universities, and people in the wider world beyond academia actually cared. Thus it was when, 50 years ago tomorrow, on May 22, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson addressed an audience of some 90,000 at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Johnson had already used the phrase "great society" on  other occasions, but that day he elaborated on the idea which would be the animating ideal of his presidency. It would be a full-force, all-out effort not just to remediate this or that isolated economic injustice but to short-circuit the vicious cycle of poverty and provide society with a more just, equitable, and fulfilling framework.

"The Great Society," Johnson declared, "serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. ... It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods." Of course, like all such progressive ideals of the time, the "Great Society" presupposed abundance as a prerequisite. But presuming that, the greatness of Johnson's ideal lay precisely in aiming beyond merely the material redistribution abundance makes possible. Johnson's "Great Society" was "a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor."

Imagine that!  Our society and it so communal fabric have so deteriorated since then that such aspirations seem almost beyond even imagining. It says a lot about the early 1960s (before everything started to fall apart) that we could actually entertain such aspirations!

Saint Peter Celestine

In the old calendar, today was the feast of Saint Peter Celestine (c. 1215-1296). Pietro da Morrone was a Benedictine solitary, who founded a branch of the Benedictines subsequently known as the Celestines. In 1294, the College of Cardinals ended a prolonged vacancy of the Holy See by electing the pious hermit pope by "inspiration." He became Pope Celestine V. As the pre-1969 Roman Breviary told the story, "he was elected to the Chair of Peter without his knowledge and in his absence. The news of his election filled everyone with as great amazement,a s it did with sudden joy. But when he had been elevated to the papacy, distracted with various troubles, he saw that it was almost impossible to attend to his accustomed meditations, and resigned the burden, as well as the honor, of his own free will."

His surprising reign and even more surprising resignation in December 1294 - after only 5 months on the papal throne - were followed by the election of the infamous Boniface VIII, who soon had the ex-pope arrested and imprisoned at Fumone in Campagna. He died in there on May 19, 1296. Canonized in 1313, he is still venerated in his native Abruzzi region, where he is buried at L'Aquila, the site damaged by a severe earthquake in 2009. It was while visiting that site afterwards that Pope Benedict XVI placed his original papal pallium on Pope Saint Celestine's tomb (photo). In 2013, Pope Benedict became the first pope since Celestine V to resign the papal office. Thankfully, he has been able to enjoy a more peaceful and dignified retirement than Celestine was afforded!

In his Inferno (III, 59-60), Dante placed one, "who by his cowardice made the great refusal." This unnamed figure has been widely (although not unanimously) thought to be Pope Celestine, whose abdication Dante blamed for making possible the reign of Boniface VIII, whose assertion of papal political supremacy Dante disputed in his De Monarchia. Boniface himself was still alive when Dante wrote his Divina Comedia, but Dante put him in hell anyway.

Pope Celestine's story served for a long time as a negative precedent against the desirability of future papal resignations. Pope Benedict and his successor, Pope Francis, have now created a new, much more positive precedent, which may historically serve the Church better than the sad story of Celestine and Boniface.