75 Years Ago

75 years ago today, Germany surrendered unconditionally and World War II ended in Europe. (The Pacific war continued another three months more.) Normally, we would have expected to see large-scale commemorations of this event - as we saw last year for the 75th anniversary of D-Day.  But, of course, all such celebrations are cancelled this year, and our commemoration of that great moment in modern history is inevitably muted by the contemporary tragedy we are presently experiencing.

World War II remains somehow central to our cultural consciousness. World War II movies and documentaries remain a permanent staple. (That is why I look forward every Sunday to the latest episode of World on Fire on PBS.) The war was even more central to the consciousness of my parents' generation, of course. Their "greatest generation" came of age in the war and was forever formed by that experience, as was American and European politics pretty much until at least the end of the Cold War, which was in a sense the epilogue to the unfinished European and world conflict of the 20th century.

Much as World War II formed the political consciousness of those who came of age during it and participated in it, our present pandemic will likely form the political consciousness of those whose futures are being formed by it now. An important difference, however, is that World War II was largely a unifying experience for the"greatest generation." There was a strong sense of all being in it together and all pulling their weight in support of a common purpose. Perhaps if we now had the kind of high quality leadership the country had during World War II something similar would be happening now. But of course, we don't. Nor are we the same sort of society we were three-quarters of a century ago. This is a crisis that disproportionately damages the poorer and more marginalized and which has heightened rather than diminished the divisions and inequalities which have increasingly corrupted American society since 1980.

Maybe that is why World War II nostalgia is so strong, why World War II stories and movies exert such a perennial appeal. They remind us that evil can come perilously close to winning and that the cost of stopping it is high, but that a united society can do so, because it can call forth from its citizens the best in us.

In Whatsoever Wise Live We

When I lived for a summer near Siezenheim, Austria, in 1970, I often attended Mass at the village's Pfarrkirche, its parish church (photo), which - as is typical of so many European and older American Catholic and Protestant churches - is surrounded by a parish cemetery. To enter that small but beautiful baroque church, one had first to walk through that cemetery, where locals liked to visit and decorate the graves of their relatives - along with the cemetery's most noteworthy grave, that of Hapsburg Archduke Ludwig Viktor (1842-1919), Kaiser Franz Josef's younger brother who had lived nearby in Schloss Klessheim, on the very grounds of which I was doing my German language study.

To walk regularly through one's local cemetery en route to the church where most of those buried there had once worshipped is a particularly wholesome reminder both of the communion of saints and of one's own very real mortality. In modern America, however, most of us experience fewer and fewer such reminders. What was once a routine churchgoing experience is increasingly unlikely as the distance between churches and cemeteries has grown - so much so that sometimes the longest part of a funeral is the drive to the cemetery! Increasingly, cemeteries are far away places seldom visited, seldom encountered in any meaningful way.

That physical distance may contribute to the problem, but it is really much more a symptom of the modern social reality in which death has become increasingly invisible. Even at funerals, the body of the deceased is increasingly absent. What was once the center of attention at a funeral is increasingly not there at all! No wonder Frank Sinatra's I Did it My Way may be more commonly heard at "funerals" than In Paradisum.

But now, all of a sudden, into this strange, inhuman society of death-denial, the universal experience of human mortality has re-appeared - in this instance dying on a widespread society-wide scale. (In just a few months, the United States has experienced more COVID-19 deaths than American combat deaths in a decade of war in Vietnam.)

Ironically, as death has reasserted itself on the human stage, funerals have disappeared, a curious consequence of pandemic precautions. Perhaps that has always been the case during plagues, when the number of deaths combined with fear of disease undermine normal expectations. Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War described in gruesome detail the consequences of the great plague which hit Athens in 430 B.C., during the second year of the war, killing perhaps 25% of its population. Thucydides, who himself caught the disease and recovered, described the plague's catastrophic effect on society and piety as people increasingly neglected their religious obligations toward the dead.

The loss of such all-important, traditional rituals as the Wake - or "Receiving Friends" as it is called in this part of the country - along with the loss of many of the funeral and burial rites themselves, is a psychic and social disaster, the toll of which on our world we cannot yet measure. Meanwhile, it has left us alone with death, with our own mortality which we have suddenly been forced to remember.

There is an old saying, "In whatsoever wise live we, die we."  Never in my long lifetime has that obsessively ignored but utterly commonplace fact come back into public consciousness as forcefully as it has since this pandemic. The question is: what impact will it have on how we live?

Praying for the Tsar

In Fiddler on the Roof, there is a scene where the Rabbi is asked if there is a proper blessing for the Tsar. To this, the Rabbi responds, "May God bless and keep the Tsar ... far away from us!"

I often think of that perfectly nuanced prayer whenever religious leaders cite Saint Paul's instruction to pray for civil authorities. Saint Paul was quite right to do so, of course; but, here as elsewhere, context counts. 

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all men, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life, godly and respectful in every way. This is good, and it is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Timothy 2:1-4).

In other words, we are commanded to pray for those in authority, precisely in their public capacity, so that they may be able to fulfill their mission, which is our earthly society's peace and well being - that they might in the words of the US Constitution promote the general welfare.  

Of course, as Christians we pray also for their personal health and well-being. We wish no less for anyone, whether in public or private life. The particular prayers we are commanded to offer for our public officials, however, are for them in their public capacity, as those whose mandate it is to promote the general welfare.

In the Jewish Pale of Settlement in Imperial Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, a prayer for the Tsar to fulfill his proper mission, to promote peace and the well being and general welfare of his empire, might , in that context, quite properly take the form of a prayer to keep him "far away from us." Analogously, in a 21st-century democratic polity, the equivalent prayer for peace and the well being and general welfare of a society might just as legitimately be that those in comparable positions of power not be re-elected.


  (Photo: Fiddler On the Roof by Lev Segal, Netanya, Israel)

Always Easter

To repeat the same news over and over again is one way to highlight its importance. To hear the proclamation of the resurrection, over and over, during these Easter Sundays strengthens our faith by the witness of others’ faith - in particular that of the apostles. That is why one of the most noticeable features that distinguishes Easter from other seasons of our Catholic liturgical calendar is the daily reading from the Acts of the Apostles. Through our journey with the original apostles through the book of Acts, we identify ourselves with that first generation of Christians in their experience of the Risen Christ, becoming like them a community which witnesses to the presence and action of the Risen Lord in his Church, something we very much need to be at this difficult time.

In today’s 1 reading from Peter’s preaching to the people that first Pentecost Sunday [Acts 2:14a, 36-41], Peter wanted his hearers to feel personally impacted by his message – not simply hearing some new bit of information about which one might or might not care, as we all do all the time in our “information age.” According to the Acts of the Apostles, Peter was apparently quite successful. The people, we are told, were cut to the heart, and they asked Peter and the other apostles, “What are we to do, my brothers?”

The proclamation of the good news – whether in 1st-century Jerusalem or 21st-century Tennessee - ought always to lead to that same invitation to respond with true conversion of heart, in repentance which resolves guilt with forgiveness and the freedom which comes from forgiveness. As Peter told the people, the promise is made to all those ... whomever the Lord our God will call. We hear this message repeated, Sunday after Sunday, during this Easter season, as something intended not just for the 1st century, but for every time and place and especially for this terribly difficult time in which we find ourselves here and now.

Homily for the 4th Sunday of Easter, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, May 3, 2020.

The entire Mass may be viewed on the Immaculate Conception Church Facebook Page and later on the parish website icknoxville.org

Essential Workers

In today’s Gospel [Matthew 13:54-58], Jesus returns to his hometown, where the townspeople, to whom Jesus and his family have long been very familiar - and very ordinary - take offense at him. He was (or so they thought) an ordinary guy, someone like them, a working-class schlepp (as one might say back in New York).

We hear this gospel story today in the context of our current crisis, which has highlighted society’s extreme dependence for our survival on all sorts of ordinary workers, like those who work in grocery stores, for example, workers we ordinarily treat as unimportant compared with rich and powerful people whose work benefits largely only themselves and people like them.

Two and a half centuries ago, Adam Smith, spoke disapprovingly about what he called “This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition,” which he called “the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”

How ironic that it is precisely such ordinary, unappreciated “persons of poor and mean condition,” whose social and economic well-being our society has largely neglected for decades, are now seen as “essential workers” - poorer people in low-paying jobs that our wealth-worshipping society habitually disrespects and whom this present pandemic so directly endangers.

When Pope Pius XII invented today’s feast of Saint Joseph the Worker in 1955, he did so in response to the 20th-century labor movement. The social and economic progress made by workers in the 20th-century is now largely a thing of the past.  As our current crisis demonstrates, for many (who in an earlier era would have been beneficiaries of the labor movement) things have been getting consistently worse on multiple levels.  It’s nice to step out on one’s balcony and applaud essential workers, as many do these days in certain cities. But maybe the moral of this feast is that a lot more is called for, lest we too, like the people in Nazareth, dramatically miss the point of what God is showing us by becoming not just one of us, but an ordinary, unappreciated worker one of us!

Homily for the feast of Saint Joseph the Worker, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, May 1, 2020.

The entire Mass may be viewed on the Immaculate Conception Church Facebook Page and later on the parish website icknoxville.org.