Letting the Pope Write For You

On Saturday afternoon I was waiting for the complete text of the Pope's address from the World Youth Day evening vigil to land on the internet. It came just in time, about an hour before evening confessions in Wahoo—just enough time to steal his best lines and make a homily out of it. 

Of All Pastors, I Am Most Richly Blessed

Father's Day, my birthday, my first weekend in Wahoo: all on the same day.

Here's the homily. Here's to a great year.

Holy Thursday 2016

1. The reflection on the stones is one I can't take credit for. That's from my classmate Fr. Brendan Kelly. In both Masses I failed to give credit, so I want to do so here.

2. If you had kids in Totus Tuus in the Diocese of Lincoln last summer, they may have already heard the story at the end here. I always give that caveat though. I am not responsible for any mishaps your children may engage in.

MOPS Talk on the Sabbath

The MOPS group (Mothers of Pre-Schoolers) in Minden invited me to give a talk on Keeping Holy the Sabbath. I had made a joke at the beginning that I may talk a little too fast and that that is even what I had named this blog. They chuckled, I told myself to go slow, and then ended up going about as fast as I can remember in any talk recently. Maybe knowing they were tired moms made me subconsciously think I needed to go quickly? Who knows.

Content note: At the beginning of the talk I told the story of the ancient martyrs of Abitene who proclaimed "We cannot live without Sunday!" I messed up a few details. I got a few names jumbled as I was trying to read some of the detail bits off my phone as I went. If you want to read the whole (accurate) story click here.

And here is the audio of the talk itself.

I Will Never Vote For Trump Under Any Circumstance

The following political opinions are mine alone. They are not necessarily those of my parishes, school, diocese, or the Church as a whole.

In the spring of 2011 I was teaching Church History to sophomores in Wahoo, Nebraska. I was trying to help my students visualize the end of the Roman Empire: what it looks like when the world's most influential central power devolves into many little states and the pace of life slows to a trot. I wrote a ten page story from the point of view of one of my students looking back from 2050, reimagining the events of 4th-6th century Rome happening in America over some forty years. In a moment of near prescience I wrote:

Politics was getting nastier. After the 2008 Obama victory, a grass-roots, uncompromising bloc emerged within the Republican Party called the “Tea Party”. Four years later, a grass-roots, uncompromising bloc developed within the Democrats: the “New American Party”. The country seemed radicalized. The 2016 election, the first one I got to vote in, nearly divided the country permanently. There were mutual accusations of horrible misconduct; there was mudslinging, voter fraud, and intimidation. As we waited to see if a clear, fair winner could be determined, Texas talked seriously of seceding from the union…again.
  

Texas stayed in when the election went basically “their way”. The fact that we got pulled into the great Middle Eastern war the next year continued to polarize Americans.

Had I possessed actual foreknowledge, the only differences would be the name of the 2016 grass roots movement within the Democratic Party and a prediction that the Republicans would have three competing subgroups: the establishment GOP, the Tea Party, and whatever we call the movement built entirely around Donald J. Trump's candidacy. Hopefully the rest of these paragraphs never comes true.

What is mind-boggling then is that even as I dreamed up an American apocalypse I still couldn't come up with anything as fantastical as reality in this election cycle. Who, even in fiction, would predict the morass we have right now? The Democrats are split into Progressive and More Progressive wings, while the Republicans, who have long been locked in debates of principle versus electability, are about to be overwhelmed by a candidate who has rejected the best tenets of conservatism while imbibing the worst ideas of modern liberalism. I can see now little of the future, but I do know that I will not vote for Donald Trump under any circumstance, no matter what else that means for this country.

Before you assume that I reject Trump out of a mere dislike for his personality or that I am a "principle over pragmatism" zealot, let me share a few things. As a ninth-grader in 1993 I asked for and received Rush Limbaugh's "See I Told You So" for Christmas. In 2014 I voted for a local Democrat for the first, and so far only, time in my life. In 2004 I transferred residency to Pennsylvania where I was in grad school in order to vote against Arlen Specter in the primary (despite endorsements by Rick Santorum and George W. Bush) because he was pro-choice, but then voted for him in the general, as Cardinal Ratzinger had put it, due to "the presence of proportionate reasons."

Since my childhood I was always drawn to the Republican party. Their defense of life in the womb, their encouragement of enterprise and the free market, their defense of marriage and family, and their appreciation of subsidiarity in government all made me a staunch ally. As I aged I began to appreciate certain ideals in the Democrats too: justice for laborers, concern for the forgotten, reasonable immigration reform. In recent years many tenets of the Libertarian movement have also impressed me: a passion for civil liberties, a less invasive State, and a smaller, humbler foreign policy footprint. With very few exceptions, Mr. Trump has explicitly rejected all the things I love and value. He shares Sanders' and Clinton's contemptible positions on abortion, punitive taxes, and government interference, but he has also bedecked himself with the worst bits of Republican reactionism: nativist attacks against Latinos and Muslims, contempt for women as leaders and thinkers, and promises to "bring back a hell of a lot worse than water boarding."

It is odd that many who back Trump also jeer that in 2008 President Obama ran on empty slogans of "hope and change", on his charismatic personality and rousing rhetoric, and on promises that as an outsider he could turn around the failed policies of previous years. This is almost exclusively what Trump too is running on, and the little that is more substantive than this is, as stated above, rather terrible. Many Republicans howled "Monarch! Dictator!" whenever Obama made an executive order. Do they really think that a swaggering megalomaniac like Trump will issue less executive orders? 

I will not vote for this man. Some Conservatives say, "I know he lacks a lot of our principles, but if not Trump we will get Hillary or Bernie. Imagine the Supreme Court justices they will appoint." To which I reply, "Imagine the justices Trump will pick! If we are lucky they would just be hectoring egoists who change positions with the seasons like Trump himself. If we are unlucky they would be committed practitioners of the worst twistings of justice, like his own sister, Maryanne Trump Barry." 

This is not Ralph Nader fans settling for Gore in 2000 in order to stop Bush, or Buchanan backers choosing Bush just to beat Gore. It is one thing to hold your nose and vote for an imperfect member of your own party who has a chance of winning in order to block the opposition; it is another thing to think you must choose between two people with near-identical views: the first one honestly dressed and the other masquerading as the first's opponent—with some extra nationalism and disregard for civil liberties sprinkled on top. I disagree with Alasdair MacIntyre's 2004 assessment that there can be a duty to not vote when presented "two politically intolerable alternatives"; I choose to spend my vote on a minor party. But if MacIntyre can say this when faced with Bush/Kerry, how much more would he say it of Trump/Clinton or Trump/Sanders? MacIntyre helps us realize that a protest vote is not wasting your vote if it can truly be registered as a protest. 

Critics of Trump have compared some of his positions and style of rhetoric to historic figures like Henry Ford, Adolf Hitler, or a dozen deeply flawed US presidents. But one does not have go "full Godwin's Law" to realize that people in any nation can be lead into dangerous ideas and destructive practices. We must constantly remind ourselves that it was God-fearing, church-going, Bible-believing Christians who whipped their fellow men half to death for two hundred years in America. It was France, the "eldest daughter of the Church" that guillotined her own priests and nuns and her "most Christian king". Germany was the most educated and cultured nation on the planet in the 1930s. No people is immune from talking itself into evil.

Finally, I must give an answer to the question, "Should a Catholic priest be giving an opinion on politics?" Yes, and here's why. First, I may be a priest but I am a private citizen as well. I get a vote, and I do not tell people whom to vote for, either from the pulpit or here. I have merely said what I will and will not do. Second, some things of the political world cross over into the moral world. I am not about to preach on tax policy or the TPP, but like priests, bishops, and popes in generations past, good Christians and their pastors have a duty to raises their voices in the face of moral evils. Trump's incendiary rhetoric about women, migrants, Muslims, and torture is reprehensible and his permissive attitude on abortion is worse. I would rather be imagined a loudmouth now than find myself and others looking around eight years later asking, "How the heck did we get here?" Edmund Burke, in his surprisingly early critiques of the French Revolution in the fall of 1789, showed us that ideas have consequences and that you can denounce bad ideas even before they have fully blossomed into their worst consequences. I do not know what Trump would actually do in office (he is too much of a chameleon to tell) but the ideas he has advocated are warning enough for me. I will not vote for him in the primary or general election. 

All Saints Day - The Church's Senior Yearbook

I should have posted this a week ago. This is the homily for All Saints Day, November 1st.

Even though preachers are encouraged to beg, borrow, and steal, we should give credit where credit is due (or at least when credit can be remembered). My first year in the seminary, Fr. Joe Szolack preached on All Saints and used this idea of the saints' yearbook. The only specific item I am conscious of borrowing from him is the jock table and the cutest couple, but other ideas may be similar too. It's been 18 years. I regret nothing; he gave an awesome homily. Anyway, here is my rendition.

Misfiring Shots Heard Around the World

The Fourth of July ticks me off. Not because I dislike America, but because I like the truth. Really what I dislike is how some Americans act on the Fourth. I know a lot of the dumb stuff said around this holiday is tongue in cheek, things like, “Dear Britain, <bleep> yourselves! Love, America.” I know it’s good to let off some steam alongside the bombs bursting in air. I get it that when you’re the superpower and a lot of countries want to play David to your Goliath it feels good to remember when you were still the underdog. Cool. But if we’re going to play American independence like we’re a teenage kid getting pissed off at Dad and punching him in the front lawn before taking off to follow our own hopes and dreams, let’s notice that literally no son has ever looked more like his dad than the USA does. If Great Britain was seen as the blustering, arrogant, bullying empire of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, then it should come as no surprise that the U.S. owns that title for the 20^th and 21^st ones. And if America is “exceptional”, we should realize it’s largely due to the exceptional political heritage of the nation of England.

This is hard for me to write. I love my country and I love its story. I’m a history junkie and I love great epics. I love heroes. I spent my high school years devouring stuff on the American Civil War because it seemed to me the great modern Iliad: one culture, two peoples, two armies, heroes and villains, cowards and common folk. I literally was so devoted to the idea and object of America that when my reversion back to practicing the Catholic faith took place in 1995 I struggled with giving myself fully to God out of fear that it might someday put me athwart my homeland. I was a literal “My country, right or wrong, my country” kind of patriot. And like many Americans I believed we were exceptional. If not specially blessed by God, then at least we were the proud, brilliant inventors of rights, liberty, and democracy. Little did I realize that in the 1770s nothing could be more thoroughly English than the rhetoric of Patrick Henry, the militias of Boston, and the documents that came out of Philadelphia.

That word “English” needs some explaining. My constant frustration with the American historical mindset is that we (and not just Ron Swanson) tend to think that human history began in 1776. Most of us can’t explain why we speak English but that our Revolution was against “the British.” Quick historical summary: The Anglo-Saxons settled in the land south of Scotland and east of Wales and that nation became known as England. When Elizabeth I died in 1603, her cousin King James of Scotland became the ruler of England too. The 17^th century saw horrible wars within and among all the nations of the British Isles, which through a long and tortuous road ended with the Treaty of Union in 1707 making Scotland, England, and Wales, into a single realm, Great Britain. In 1800 Ireland was added, and they called that realm The United Kingdom. This is important because while in 1775 the Minutemen were firing on the red-coated regulars of Great Britain, the American statesmen were quoting, often verbatim, the arguments of the English Civil War, the political cataclysm of the mid-1600s. To quote Simon Schama on Boston and the Stamp Act: “The problem for [British Prime Minister] Grenville, did he but know it, was that he was making trouble for the best-read smugglers in the world. And what they read was history—English history, the epic history of English liberty.”

We were taught in school that the American Revolution was about “No taxation without representation”, but who invented that rallying cry? Not John Adams, but John Pym and John Hampden, the heroes of the Long Parliament in 1640. I was taught (and will still hear conservative broadcast personalities say) that our Amendments for bearing arms and against quartering soldiers were added because of “the tyrannical things King George did in Boston.” Well, maybe he did, but the America founding fathers knew those things were tyrannical because people had suffered them throughout the 1640s and 50s in the successive tyrannies of King Charles, Parliament, and the New Model Army. 

These 17th century English principles stoked the American grievances of the 18th century. Four months before Lexington and Concord, William Pitt the Elder stood before Parliament and declared that the colonies were not rebelling against English law but were rebelling in order to claim their rights within English law: “This resistance to your arbitrary system of taxation might have been foreseen: it was obvious […] above all, from the Whiggish spirit flourishing in that country. The spirit which now resists your taxation in America is the same which formerly opposed loans, benevolences, and ship-money in England: the same spirit which called all England on its legs, and by the Bill of Rights [of 1689] vindicated the English constitution: the same spirit which established the great, fundamental, essential maxim of your liberties, that no subject of England shall be taxed but by his own consent. This glorious spirit of Whiggism animates three millions in America; who prefer poverty with liberty to gilded chains and sordid affluence; and who will die in defence of their rights as men, as freemen.”

Catch that? The English Bill of Rights was in existence a hundred years before the American one. Now, what about that most glorious of Constitutional Amendments, the First, which assures freedom of religion, speech, press, and assembly? It is true that the American fathers expanded it beyond what had been promised in its English predecessor. In America, freedom of speech was granted to all citizens, not just to lawmakers in debate. Freedom of religion was given—not just to all Protestants but to all men. It is often pointed out that Jefferson, Adams, and Madison got their ideas from Hobbes and Locke, but what we don’t get told is that what got Hobbes and Locke reflecting on liberty and governments was the tumultuous half century of 1640-90. In the freedoms of religion and speech, we see the American framers going further, perhaps because they could see the need to respect consciences (especially since many were from Puritan families, dismissed from Britain in the 1660s) and perhaps because after two hundred years of wars of religion in Europe they saw it as the only way to safeguard peace. 

What then is the United States but an end product of England’s attempts to define personal liberty and self-government? America, what did you hurl in Britain's face but his own promises of natural rights that you felt he had failed to keep? Certainly America has not stayed put in the last 239 years, and neither has Britain, but this spirit of liberty is not our divider, but our common heritage. Another time I would like to look at how the English emphasis on liberty and the French emphasis on equality are the two great competing streams running through American thought in the last two centuries, but for now I just want to say thank you to the United Kingdom for educating us in liberty and training us how to live in independence.

P.S. Dad, when we turn a quarter millennium, can we borrow the car?