The Relevance of the Stars

Christ, Culture, Destiny

Lorenzo Albacete

• Publisher: Slant Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781639820849
• eBook ISBN: 9781639820863
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Essays

From popes to television personalities to high school students, everyone who encountered Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete knew there was no one like him. He could engage you with a joke about a New Yorker cartoon, move on to a keen commentary on the state of the culture, and finish off with a meditation on the Gospel of John. In his talks and essays, Albacete made profound theological and philosophical insights accessible without ever losing their depth and breadth.But with the exception of a single book published in his lifetime, much of Albacete's wisdom has been scattered and hard to find. The Relevance of the Stars fills this vacuum. With his characteristic wit and ease, Albacete engages the thorniest questions--the relation of faith and reason, the problem of modernity, the possibility of a Christian culture--as they play out in science and politics, money and love, law and finance. He speaks to families, youth, and his friends in the media.The New Yorker cartoons feature here, of course, alongside Dostoevsky, Flannery O'Connor, and Elie Wiesel. Albacete masterfully engages the thought of John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Father Luigi Giussani, the founder of the international lay movement Communion and Liberation, whose passion for the infinite Albacete made his own.

IV. The Relevance of the Stars

God at The New Yorker

Faith, Reason, and the Varieties of Secular Experience

IN 1999, THE CARDINAL Archbishop of New York, John O’Connor, invited me to be a visiting professor of theology at the archdiocesan seminary. He also asked me to help in two areas of Church life in the archdiocese: the Hispanic apostolate and the possible establishment of an archdiocesan office for faith and culture.

Cardinal O’Connor was familiar with my work for the international Catholic movement Communion and Liberation, for which the relation between faith and culture is of central concern. Father Luigi Giussani, an Italian priest, founded this movement in 1954 when his work with young people led him to the conclusion that, in spite of the apparent strength of the Catholic Church at that time in Italy, for these young people the Catholic faith was merely a source of abstract ideas and values that had no relation to their experience of life.

In response to this situation and convinced that faith devoid of experience will not produce culture, Father Giussani left his work as a seminary professor of theology to teach at a high school in order to reach young people at a time when they were forming their own view of what life is all about. He had no intentions of organizing a movement. Communion and Liberation was born simply from the impact his experience had on his students.

Today, the movement is found in all parts of the world, with communities made up of people of all ages, cultures, and areas of work. The way in which the experience of faith generates a culture remains one of its major areas of concern. In the early 1990s, Father Giussani had asked me to help the communities in the United States to understand better the American religious experience and its effect on what has become, in fact, the dominant culture of the world. Cardinal O’Connor was familiar with my involvement with this effort, hence his interest in seeing what could be done in New York.

Soon after I arrived in New York, a friend from Washington, DC., who writes for the liberal weekly The New Republic, held a dinner to welcome me to the city. Among the guests were several of his friends from the secular media, among them Hendrik Hertzberg, a writer and editor at The New Yorker. When he learned about my work studying the thought of Pope John Paul II, Rick invited me to a few lunches with him and other editors to discuss the possibility of writing an article about the then upcoming visit of Pope John Paul II to Cuba. The result was the cover article that I wrote for the January 26, 1998 issue, “The Poet and the Revolutionary.”

In less than a year after my arrival in New York I had written a cover article for The New Yorker.

It was my first experience of the profound interest in secular media circles in the challenges to modern culture posed by the personal life experiences of John Paul II who—as a former poet, actor, dramatist, and modern philosopher—appeared to belong to their intellectual world.

Of course, as I expected, among these journalists and intellectuals there was almost total rejection of his teachings in such areas as sexual morality, the ordination of women, and liberation theology. Still, it was evident that the pope had struck a chord in their hearts with a challenge to their radical secularism in the name of a devotion to the humanism they sought to profess.

Rick invited me to join a group of friends that met every week to discuss contemporary issues, all of whom shared his secular, liberal perspective. My role in these meetings, I suppose, was to represent the interests of the “Invisible Mystery,” or something like that. I found that although we differed greatly in our approach to many of the issues under discussion, we shared many of the same fundamental concerns.

In all of my interventions during the discussions, I tried to show the relationship between what my faith teaches me and those shared concerns, what Giussani and John Paul II call the “original,” “primordial,” “fundamental,” or “constitutive” desires of the human heart. The realization that we share these concerns became the basis for a true friendship among us.

Among those present at these meetings was an editor at The New York Times. She invited me to write a column about my experiences as a confessor. The response to it was so positive that I received invitations to write books from the major secular publishing houses, as well as the invitation from The New York Times to be a regular contributor to their magazine. This led to the creation of the column “Intimations.”

At the original dinner organized by my friend to introduce me to his New York colleagues, I met the TV producer, writer, and director Helen Whitney, who was working on a documentary for PBS-TV’s program Frontline about the cultural challenges posed by the teachings and personality of Pope John Paul II. Helen invited me to be an official consultant for the program, and this opened the door to still another part of that world. My task was to “explain” to Helen some of the pope’s most controversial teachings and to make sure that these were represented fairly in the show.

“The Millennial Pope” won many awards and as a result, I entered into conversation with PBS about the possibility of a new program that would discuss these issues on a weekly basis. Although the events of September 11 interrupted the fundraising for this effort, Helen was asked to do another show for Frontline dedicated precisely to September 11 and its religious implications. Again, I was asked to be the main consultant for this documentary, which was aired on the first anniversary of the terrorist attack with the title “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero.” The response to this effort was overwhelmingly favorable, and indeed in some cases deeply moving.

One fruit of these efforts was my book God at the Ritz, the result of the intense questioning on matters of religion and faith to which I was subjected during the presentation of the first Frontline program to the nation’s media critics at their annual gathering in California to preview the new TV season. The book shows the approach I have been following in all of these efforts.

These experiences have shaped my understanding of the possibility of sharing the religious proposal in a secular context. First of all, I am convinced that there is at this time an opening for the religious proposal in these circles that was not there before. Most of the people I have met are aware of the failure of radical secularism to deal adequately with the big questions about human life and its meaning, both individually and socially. The inability of secularism to prevent the horrors of violence and death brought about by the great ideological monsters who sought to dominate the world in the twentieth century has shaken their confidence in the policy of relegating faith and religion to the purely private realm. As a result, the dominant ideology in those circles has become the “ideology of ambiguity,” treasured as freedom’s only defense against intolerance. Still, I believe that deep down most of them sense that this is not a solution, that this ambiguity soon leads to apathy and cynicism.

The mechanism by which this radical ambiguity is sustained is what Giussani called the “reduction of desire.” There is a recognition that a truly human life demands more, that the human heart has an unquenchable desire for certainty and truth, and even that these cannot be found in ways of thinking that exclude the religious dimension. Without it, truth becomes the convictions of the most powerful. Secularists also sense that an ethics not based on a perception of the truth remains an artificial moralism—a moralism incapable of inspiring or moving anyone to great acts of creativity.

Still, secularists are afraid. In a sense, they are afraid to desire and expect too much. Why? Because this necessarily leads to religion, and they are terrified of the intolerance and violence that religion has often fostered. September 11 only intensified those fears. The popularity of “religion without truth claims” offers an escape for many people in our society today, but my friends in the media are too smart for that.

Those of us concerned with religion and the public square must address this concern. Two areas, I believe, are the most important.

The first is religion and reason—or better, religion and rationality. In a way, the religious question is secondary. It cannot be addressed adequately until an adequate view of rationality is developed, one based on experience and not on abstract arguments. Here experience means those “original” or “primordial” desires of the human heart and their implications. It is these implications—these ineradicable desires that constitute our humanity—that will open the door to the religious proposal.

In dialogues structured around these issues, it is important to demonstrate that religious believers share the same fundamental desires as those who are afraid of religion, and there is no stronger demonstration of this than the friendship offered and shown to our partners in dialogue. There is no need to hold back or disguise our convictions or to try to formulate a compromise or to look for a minimal “common ground.” One editor of The New York Times told me: “Monsignor, we have many friends who are priests and who agree with us on almost everything. As a result, what they have to say is not really interesting. Those who disagree with us, however, do not want to be our friends. You are here because you do not agree with us on many issues, but it is obvious that you like us and see us as your friend.”

The second area for study and dialogue is the relation between faith and tolerance. Does faith, with its absolutist connotations, necessarily lead to intolerance of different viewpoints? A faith limited to private conditions or feelings is not a threat, but then neither does it have any power to move anyone and play a serious role in culture.

Here the problem lies with the nature of “truth-claims” themselves. If these are taken seriously (as faith takes them), they appear to be incompatible with the requirements of a pluralistic society. As Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI) wrote in an Italian journal of atheist thought—yes, Cardinal Ratzinger!—the greatest objection to religious thought today is its claim to be the only way to deal with ultimate issues. This concern was the heart of the pagan opposition to Christianity in the Roman Empire. Its position was perfectly summarized by a pagan author: “It is impossible to arrive at such a great mystery by only one way.” Ratzinger comments, “The ethos of tolerance belongs to whoever recognizes in each way at best a part of the truth, to the one who does not place his own perception of it above any other and thus inserts himself serenely in the polymorphous symphony of the Inaccessible Eternal,” or as someone told me during such a dialogue, the Unknowable Essence.”

The most important problem to be dealt with in order to respond to the opening toward the religious sense that exists in those who experience the poverty of radical secularism is the relation between religion, reason, truth, and tolerance.

Tenderness and the Gas Chambers

The Challenges Facing Medicine Today

WALKER PERCY’S 1987 NOVEL The Thanatos Syndrome—his last one—tells the story of a psychiatrist who discovers that the government is conducting illegal mood-altering experiments on the unsuspecting population of a small town in order to eliminate violent crimes. The time of the action is in a near future in which abortion and euthanasia have become common practice in the medical profession. Dwelling in the same place is an old priest, considered an eccentric because he refuses to live in a parish and minister there. Instead, he lives on top of a tower used to spot forest fires. In one conversation with the psychiatrist, the priest tells him of his refusal to preach. It is useless, he says, because words have been deprived o...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• I. A Point of Departure
• II. America and Modernity
• III. A Passion for the Infinite
• IV. The Relevance of the Stars
• Acknowledgments