Election Day. Nearly noon.
Appropriately, the sky is dark and a heavy rain is falling. I’m in Brooklyn. Elections provoke my inner cynic to claw his way out and pronounce a pox on both major political parties (and on the plucky-but-perennially-irrelevant minor parties). The contagion of ideology has infected our politics and our Church with predictably necrotic results. Ideology is by its very nature the death of authentic religion.
Catholic Christianity — which is to say authentic, historical Christianity — is not adherence to a structure but love of a Person. To see the figure of Jesus through the lens of capitalism or socialism is a grievous modern error that thoroughly distorts our view of Him. And in distorting our view of Jesus, ideology distorts our view of man, to whom Jesus has united Himself through the Incarnation.
I’ve been asked about the name of my blog: 3:59 p.m. It is, I suppose, an odd name; an explanation might be in order. It is, in one sense, a reference to something John mentions near the beginning of his Gospel: the first disciples encounter Jesus “about four in the afternoon” (1:39). It was such a profound, unforgettable experience that they remembered the very hour it occurred.
But in a related sense it’s a reference to something said by the late (and very great) Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete, who at the time was the spiritual leader of the Communion and Liberation movement in the U.S. He and a younger priest were flying to the West Coast for a conference but had a multi-hour layover in Las Vegas. The younger priest complained rather openly about Sin City, the depravity and soullessness of its denizens. When he noticed Albacete’s silence, he turned to him and asked, “You don’t actually approve of this place, do you?”
Monsignor paused, then said: “I see a city full of people at 3:59 p.m.”
That is the authentically Catholic gaze upon reality that is almost wholly absent from our current political discourse.
I often wonder what Monsignor would make of today’s political scene. He proposed, as all Catholics should, a Person, Jesus of Nazareth. Albacete never proposed an ideology, because Christ Himself never proposed an ideology.
A few days ago, I got into a bit of a tussle with a Catholic writer I follow on Twitter. When I took him to task for dehumanizing those with whom he disagreed politically, he accused me of trying to “turn Jesus into a left-wing pansy.” I tweeted in reply that Jesus was “no more a left-wing pansy than a right-wing curmudgeon.” We live in a supremely odd moment of history, when Catholics have by and large transferred the Church’s infallibility to their pet political ideologies. We are less offended by criticisms of our Church than by criticisms of our ideologies. As we enter the voting booth today, it’s worth remembering that Jesus never extolled the virtues of a free market; He never preached a socialist revolution. To claim Jesus for capitalism or communism is to miss the point of Jesus entirely.
The rain is letting up now. In a few hours, election results will begin their marathon chyron scroll across the bottoms of our TV screens. I fully expect Monsignor Albacete will watch alongside me, and patiently remind my inner cynic that I’m seeing a nation full of people at 3:59 p.m.
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