I was up late last night baking chocolate chip cookies, watching the returns, and trying to sort my feelings about the election.  I was pleased, yes, but in a way that was hard for me to grasp.

As I watched the returns come in, the first thing I felt was a sense of satisfaction.  I felt strongly that the judgment of this election needed to extend beyond the president himself to include his party. I agreed with James Fallows that “for America to return the incumbent party to power after this record would make a mockery of the idea of ballot-box accountability and two-party competition.”  A majority of voters clearly agreed with that assessment.

A second emotion, which rushed in after the networks called it for Senator Obama, was pride.  There was no question that this was a historic day, not merely for African-Americans, but for the nation.  I thought of those-Black and White-who had marched and organized and even died to make this day possible.  I thought once again of my own ancestral roots in antebellum Virginia and the historical burden those bloodlines entail.  My reflection was made more poignant by Obama’s invocation of Ann Nixon Cooper during his acceptance speech.  While there were many Nixon families in the South, it is not outside the realm of possibility that some of my ancestors owned some of Mrs. Cooper’s as property.

A third feeling, which emerged during the president-elect’s acceptance speech, was hope.  The deep sobriety of his address conveyed to me that this was man who understands both the dangers and possibilities of the present moment in our nation’s history.  We clearly have elected a man of singular intellectual and political gifts to guide us in a difficult time.  From his writings and his speeches, one can clearly see that he is a man who listens well, consults widely and thinks deeply before he acts.  His invocation of David Plouffe and David Axelrod during his speech reminded me of the impressive competence of his campaign organization.  It is said that presidents govern in the same way they campaign.  If that is so, we can hope for the restoration of a baseline-and much needed-competence to the day to day operations of the executive branch.

I don’t have a long laundry list of things I am looking for the new president to do.  I’d like to see a significant change of direction in foreign and military policy.  I don’t object to moving the tax burden upward a bit, but we need to pay as much attention to how to get the pie expanding again as to how to distribute it.  Before we go overboard in re-regulating the financial markets we need to be very clear what our desired outcome is.  Some form of health care reform is long, long overdue.  While it’s hard to care about deficits during a recession, I’d like to place the nation on a path to fiscal sanity again, including a solution to the long-term structural deficits in the Medicare and Social Security programs.  To the extent that the Republicans in Congress are willing to be pragmatic partners in dialogue, I think that most of these are areas where bipartisan solutions could emerge.  We need the spirit of Eisenhower to re-emerge within the Republican Party.

I am not blind to Obama’s faults, particularly the way he embraced increasingly radical positions on the issue of abortion during the campaign, such as his endorsement of the Freedom of Choice Act.  I think that Greg Sisk is right that Catholics and others with pro-life convictions who supported Obama will have a particular obligation to make themselves heard on this issue in the months to come.  This election was certainly no mandate for federalizing abortion law and limiting the ability of states to find workable ways to embed respect for the unborn in law.

A final emotion, perhaps, is sadness that the election–as expected–aggravated the political fault lines within the Catholic community.   I certainly understand the frustration of bishops with political leaders who-whether deliberately or out of true ignorance-misrepresent Catholic teaching in the public square.  The collapse, however, of what initially appeared to be a strong episcopal consensus around the Faithful Citizenship document was not an edifying sight.  Nor was the misuse or misunderstanding by many of key concepts from our tradition of moral theology: “intrinsic evil,” “prudential judgment,” “formal and material cooperation,” just to name a few. The catechetical collapse of the last few decades seems to have led to the loss of a language in which we can talk to one another.  We are the poorer for it.

Which is one of the reasons I was glad to be baking cookies last night.  The cookies are for a Christian prison retreat in which I am participating this weekend.  They were a physical reminder to me that as important as it is for Catholics to “take their faith into the public square,” the country that has our first loyalty is not of this world. Activists of the left and right may articulate their respective visions of social reform, but we are here not so much to “build the Kingdom” as to be heralds of the One who is building it.  It is true that this may sometimes require prophetic confrontation with the forces of evil.  It may also, however, require contemplative withdrawal in the face of aggressive demands to “choose a side.”  As Stanley Hauerwas once observed, the “Church does not have a social strategy, the Church is a social strategy.”  To the extent that the way we engage in social reform simply apes the worst aspects of our political culture, we become the salt that loses its flavor.  If that happens, we lose no matter how many elections we may win.

For what it’s worth, I was struck by this NYT op-ed by Johnson biographer Robert Caro back in August. Caro pinned his piece to Obama’s convention speech, but what remained with me was the remarkable transformation he described in LBJ: From good ol’ Texas pol to civil rights leader. Such development is something to be hoped for, indeed expected, in any leader as they assume high office. Perhaps it is also something for both fans and foes of Obama to ponder.

The day shouldn’t pass without the headline above appearing somewhere – I suspect it will be a dotCommonweal exclusive. Joe Biden was the forgotten “first” in a campaign that featured candidates who all were potential “firsts,” be it for race, gender, age or, in the Delaware senator’s case, religion.

Of course, John F. Kennedy blazed the trail for Catholics. But it has taken nearly 50 years for another Catholic to follow him to victory on a national ticket. This time, the issue was not whether the candidate would adhere too closely to the dictates of the Catholic hierarchy. More like the opposite: Biden had to weather some serious criticism from bishops about his views on abortion (and his bad theology on the subject).

Biden’s home town, Scranton, Pa., became a national emblem of the fight for Catholic votes. Scranton’s bishop, Joseph Martino, said he would deny the Eucharist to Biden and took many other steps to condemn not only the Obama-Biden ticket but Catholics who supported it. Lackawanna County went to the Democratic ticket, 62 percent to 36 percent – the bishop’s effort to sway voters failed. In Lackawanna County, as in the nation, a majority of Catholics supported the Obama-Biden ticket.

Having recently returned from four weeks in Europe, yesterday’s historic election was an occasion of renewed pride in the possibilities and good sense of the American people.

The gracious concession speech of Senator McCain and the magnanimous remarks of President-elect Obama serve as beacons and signs of hope for the difficult days ahead.

Networks call Ohio for Obama.  Game over.  I never thought I would see this day.  I guess (if certain Bishops are right) hell is going to be a little more crowded, but the company there will be good.

As of this morning, Pollster.com had 12 states as either “leaners” or “toss ups.”  As a hardcore “quant,” I feel compelled to make some predictions.  Here are my calls.  Feel free to make yours:

Obama: FL, MO, OH, PA, VA, ND, NV

McCain: GA, NC, IN, MT, SD

Final electoral vote totals:

Obama: 367

McCain: 171

The Diocese of Davenport, Iowa, which entered bankruptcy in 2006, announced yesterday that it has evidence that four clergymen sexually abused minors, including retired Bishop Lawrence Soens, whose case has been referred to the Vatican.

A five-member review board found Soens, who served as bishop of the Sioux City Diocese from 1983 to 1998, guilty of sexually abusing students at Iowa City Regina High School in the 1950s and 1960s, when he was principal. Soens was also found guilty of sexually abusing a male minor when Soens was rector of the St. Ambrose Seminary in Davenport.

Interesting timing.

Open thread: Feel free to post observations from your voting (or non-voting) experience–anecdotes and data, impressions and technical glitches, joys and hopes, griefs and anxieties…

Great minds ….

This is how I ended my homily yesterday:

And this is the second great truth that these days remind us of. That the horizon of our Christian vision, the horizon of our hope, extends beyond this life, beyond the grave, to a completion in the full expansion and full enjoyment of the life we have been given already to live in faith, hope and love. We live it in faith and not by sight, wishing one day to see what we now believe. We live it in hope, wishing one day to possess in its full reality what we now possess only in hope. Already, however, we live it in love, the only one of the three great Christian virtues that will survive when all the citizens of God’s holy City are gathered in. Love will define that City: God’s love achieving its final purpose in the love that makes that “great multitude which no man can number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (Rev 7:9), and from every age from the beginning of creation until its consummation, makes them one in the joyful possession of God, the full realization of the communion of holy things, the full, perfect communion of the saints. We should all be singing: “, Lord, I want to be in that number when the saints go marching in!”

And this is from the Pope’s remarks at the Angelus on All Saints Day:

On this day we feel revived in us the attraction toward heaven that urges us to quicken the steps of our earthly pilgrimage. We feel our hearts enkindled with the desire to be united with the family of the saints to which we already have the grace of belonging. As a famous spiritual says: “Oh, Lord, I long to be in that number when the saints come marching in!” May this beautiful aspiration burn in all Christians and help them to overcome any difficulty, any fear, any distress. Dear friends, let us put our hands in the maternal hand of Mary, queen of all the saints, and allow her to guide us towards the heavenly homeland, in the company of all the blessed spirits “from every nation, people and language” (Rev 7:9).

In case you’re wondering how the line was rendered in Italian, here it is: “Quando verrà la schiera dei tuoi santi, oh come vorrei, Signore, essere tra loro!” Loses something in translation, perhaps.

P.S. I swear that I hadn’t read the Pope’s remarks before writing my sermon.  At our church we didn’t sing that spiritual, but we did sing “Shall we gather at the river,” a hymn that many wrongly think is talking about going down to a river for baptisms, when it’s talking about the great “River that flows from the throne of God” through the holy city of the new Jerusalem (see Rev 22:1-2), so it’s another eschatologically oriented hymn.

HT Politico:

Young Thomas Peters, a.k.a. the “American Papist” and one of the more popular bloggers among the conservative Catholic set, has a sit-down with Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput about the election. The Papist’s excerpts from the video indicate that Archbishop Chaput will be one of those seeking a major change in the bishops’ approach when they meet in Baltimore next week:

On vocal bishops: “The bishops are aware … a quieter approach to these things has not been effective … we have to be stronger in what we say. We’ve just had it.”

On Faithful Citizenship: “[It is] not very clear. We either ought to get rid of it, or say things much clearer.”

On claiming Obama is a pro-life candidate: “It would be foolish to say that someone who … runs on a party platform that has no regret at all about abortion … to call that position pro-life is really strange.”

On IRS investigations: “It’s simply bullying. It shouldn’t stop us from talking about the important issues of our time.”

On the separation of Church and State: “We do believe in it. We don’t like the state to tell us what to do. We don’t believe in the separation of faith and politics.”

Via Sarah Pulliam at Christianity Today, some links and info to be sent around by Tuesday:

ONE: Google may be taking over the world before our eyes, but at least they’re doing it with a sense of civic duty. Just plug in your address and this locator map shows you where your local polling place is.

TWO: If you are voting for Sarah Palin, and, uh, the guy she’s running with, Krispy Kreme is giving away a free star-shaped donut “with patriotic sprinkles” to anyone with an “I Voted” sticker. (It also says something about “participating stores only,” which could be a major cop-out. Typical conservative promises.)

THREE: If you can’t guess what color “patriotic sprinkles” are, that means you are probably voting for Obama-Biden, and you are a certified latte-sipper. Hence you should visit Starbucks, which is giving away a free coffee to anyone who says they voted. (No proof needed, which proves they are mushy-headed liberals–or run by ACORN.) Also, be patient–the banner ad explaining the offer takes as long to load as it does to make a skinny mochaccino soy latte with no foam.

What more do you need?

From TPM:

Interesting anecdote and probably a testament to ground organization. I have no idea what this means. Friday night (which happens to be the start of our Sabbath) my wife answered the phone to hear a man stating he was from the McCain-Palin campaign. He asked who she was supporting. She replied that we will vote for Obama. He replied with “but he’s a f—–g n—er!”.

When the 2005 Vatican document on homosexuals and the priesthood came out, there was some debate over what Rome meant by its terms–such as “deep-seated” homosexuality, and whether the church wanted to bar even homosexuals capable of living a chaste life. When the follow-up document on psychological testing of seminarians came out this week, as posted below, it also addressed the point but did not resolve it.

But CNS’ John Thavis has a blog post on the press conference introducing this week’s document and in the transcription of Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski’s remarks, it seems pretty definitive: no gay, no how.

One lingering doubt about the homosexuality document was whether a homosexually oriented man who was nevertheless committed to celibacy could be ordained a priest. At Thursday’s press conference, Cardinal Grocholewski gave a rather forceful “no,” and here are the essential parts of his answer:

“The candidate does not necessarily have to practice homosexuality (to be excluded.) He can even be without sin. But if he has this deeply seated tendency, he cannot be admitted to priestly ministry precisely because of the nature of the priesthood, in which a spiritual paternity is carried out. Here we are not talking about whether he commits sins, but whether this deeply rooted tendency remains.”

Cardinal Grocholewski was then asked why, if a man with strong heterosexual tendencies but who is celibate can be ordained, the same could not be true of a man with homosexual tendencies? His answer:

“Because it’s not simply a question of observing celibacy as such. In this case, it would be a heterosexual tendency, a normal tendency. In a certain sense, when we ask why Christ reserved the priesthood to men, we speak of this spiritual paternity, and maintain that homosexuality is a type of deviation, a type of irregularity, as explained in two documents of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Therefore it is a type of wound in the exercise of the priesthood, in forming relations with others. And precisely for this reason we say that something isn’t right in the psyche of such a man. We don’t simply talk about the ability to abstain from these kinds of relations.”

In this Sunday’s Washington Post, Michael Dirda praises the new biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins by Paul Mariani.

There have been several previous biographies of Hopkins, including a fine one by Robert Bernard Martin, an eminent scholar of Victorian poetry. But Mariani’s possesses three great strengths: 1) Mariani has lived with Hopkins’s poetry his entire life, ever since writing a commentary on the poems as his first book; 2) over the past 40 years, he has produced biographies of American poets who might be loosely viewed as the “sons of Gerard”: Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, John Berryman and Robert Lowell; and 3) Mariani is a believing Catholic, with consequent sympathy and insight into Hopkins’s religious convictions and experiences. In several ways, then, this is a spiritual biography, intensely focused on the poet’s inner life, coupled with close analyses of his major poems.

Dirda devotes a good deal of the review to introducing the reader to Hopkins and to poems that broke with contemporary habits and pointed toward the future of poetry. Poems “meant to be recited, not read”–something easier said than done, however, given the “sprung rhythm” in which he often wrote.  The best teacher, qua teacher, I had in 20+ years of education, Fr. David Rea, was a master at it.  I can still see and hear him walking up and down the aisles at Cathedral College, reading with passion one or another of Hopkins’ poems.

Dirda concludes:

Hopkins once wrote, “I am soft sift/In an hourglass — at the wall/Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift,/And it crowds and it combs to the fall.” This is, of course, the human condition, prey to the tyranny of time. But Hopkins also knew that he had been saved from oblivion or worse by God’s gift of His only begotten son. While one may or may not believe this, there can be no doubt that Hopkins himself will be read and loved as long as poetry matters.

I’ve seen versions of this quote before. One of my favorites:

“Studs is a character,” said Scott Craig, the producer of a 1989 WTTW-Ch. 11 documentary titled, simply, “Studs.” “But that doesn’t make him a caricature. He’s been famous around here for so long that people take him for granted, like he’s some sort of landmark. One of the things I discovered in making this documentary is that Studs is now a lot more famous, and well known, outside of Chicago than he is here.”

Read the Trib obit right here.